1. No category

worker
A paper of Marxist polemic and Marxist unity
weekly
Left Unity’s internal elections:
vote Communist Platform and
ask seven vital questions
No
1048 Leomar
ConejosThursday March 5 2015
n Letters and debate
n Jihadi John and spooks
n Rise of Lega Nord
n Netanyahu’s gamble
Towards a Communist Party of the European Union
£1/€1.10
2
March 5 2015 1048 worker
weekly
letters

Letters may have been
shortened because of
space. Some names
may have been changed
Garbage
Lars Lih’s article, ‘The Bolsheviks
were fully armed’ (February 26), seems
to me to suffer from the absence of at
least two crucial distinctions.
The first - and more important concerns Lih’s view, which he shares
with the CPGB, that there was no
operational difference between, on
the one hand, the Bolshevik slogan of
‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship
of the proletariat and peasantry’ and, on
the other, Trotsky’s theory of permanent
revolution and Lenin’s April theses. On
the contrary, the differences were of
great practical significance.
The pre-April Bolsheviks were still
invested in the notion of a two-stage
revolution. They differed from the
Mensheviks, who proposed to “make the
bourgeoisie fight”, in their belief that the
Russian bourgeoisie was too weak and
vacillating to carry such a revolution to
its conclusion. The work of clearing the
way for a preliminary stage of capitalist
development would therefore devolve
upon the proletariat and peasantry.
Their revolutionary dictatorship was,
however, seen as a temporary affair, and
one that could not transgress the bounds
of bourgeois property due to Russia’s
overwhelming peasant majority. Once
political democracy had been achieved,
according to this perspective, the
dictatorship would end and the Social
Democrats would assume the role of a
working class opposition in a bourgeois
parliament.
Trotsky’s prognosis differed from
that of the Bolsheviks in two important
respects. First, he considered it utopian
to imagine that the working class, once
having conquered power in a revolution
waged not only against tsarism, but
against the bourgeoisie as well, could
turn around and cede power to the
bourgeois class antagonist it had just
vanquished. Second, he predicted that
the working class would, by the very
logic of the revolutionary situation,
be compelled to take measures that
encroached upon bourgeois property
(ie, socialist measures) and that,
once taken, such measures would
be irreversible. A socialist regime in
backward Russia could not sustain
itself, however, without the aid of
the international and, particularly, the
European working class. Lenin’s postApril views coincided in practice with
Trotsky’s. Hence the rapprochement
between the two after years of
sometimes bitter factional rivalry,
although it is true that Lenin arrived
at his views via his own analysis of the
dynamics of the February revolution,
not by reading Trotsky.
Kamenev’s Pravda editorial, written
before Lenin’s return, is obviously
guided by the ‘democratic dictatorship’
formula that Lenin was in the process
of discarding. Lih is right to point out
that this conception did envisage an
eventual clash between the bourgeois
Provisional government (PG) and the
masses. But Lih seems oblivious to the
fact that the PG, whatever measures it
was taking to dismantle tsarism, was
thoroughly committed to the war aims
of the Entente - a fact that Kamenev’s
editorial also fails to mention. And it
was precisely against the war that the
masses were revolting. The clash with
the PG was not a future inevitability.
It was already taking place on the
eastern front, from which soldiers were
deserting in droves. Lenin was correctly
convinced that the road to peace could
only lie through the overthrow of the
PG, which he therefore demanded that
the Bolsheviks adopt as their strategic
goal.
This brings me to Lih’s second
confusion. He seems not to appreciate
the distinction between overthrowing
the PG as the major Bolshevik political
goal and calling for an immediate
insurrection. The first is a matter
of strategy, the second of tactics.
Proclaiming ‘Down with Kerensky!’ no
more implies an immediate insurrection
than the slogan, ‘Down with the tsar!’,
means that the people should take to
the streets the following day. Without
setting a precise date for insurrection,
Lenin insisted upon his return that
the Bolshevik leadership adopt the
overthrow of the PG and power to the
soviets as the main strategic task of the
entire revolutionary process, towards
which they must strive to reorient the
party, the soviets and the masses. This
would have to involve propaganda,
agitation and military preparation.
Kamenev’s editorial may, as Lih
argues, anticipate a clash with the
PG in the near term. Yet he sees such
a clash, whose outcome he does not
specify, as the result of an automatically
unfolding revolutionary dynamic rather
than posing the overthrow as a concrete
task. He substitutes process for agency.
This is undoubtedly the reason why
Lenin greeted Kamenev upon returning
to Petrograd with the words, “What’s
that garbage you’ve been writing in
Pravda?”
Jim Creegan
New York
Syriza was right
I think there are several serious
theoretical errors contained in your
article, ‘Austerity in the colours of
Syriza’ (February 26).
Firstly, since when did Marxists
confuse the fact of particularly a
social democratic party, like Syriza,
taking “governmental office”, having
won an election, with a revolutionary
party taking “power”? Marxists have
historically been at pains to make a
clear distinction between the two,
because the distinction has very serious
consequences. Anyone who confuses
simply assuming governmental office,
so as to carry forward a series of
reforms compatible with a continuation
of bourgeois rule, with taking power,
which implies overthrowing the existing
class state, and erecting in its place a
workers’ state, is indeed doomed to lead
workers into the kind of catastrophe that
occurred with the Allende government
in Chile.
But, bearing that distinction in
mind, and recognising Syriza for what
it is - a traditional bourgeois social
democratic party, no different from the
Labour Party or the US Democrats - I
find the fetishising of the refusal to take
governmental office strange. Would
you similarly argue for any of your
comrades, for example, to refuse to take
up a position as a shop steward, or other
official position, on the basis that they
frequently could not even prevent wage
and job cuts, etc?
Can we assume that if Labour wins
the upcoming election, then, having
called for a vote for them, you will
demand that they refuse to take office,
because there is little chance that a
Miliband Labour government will
fulfil even a minimum programme? If,
having won such an election, Labour
did refuse to take office on the basis
you propose, indeed had the Labour
government in 1945, 1964, 1966,
1974 and so on refused to take office,
having gone to the trouble of getting
millions of workers to vote for it, what
chance do you think there is that those
workers would bother voting for such
a party in any future election? Indeed,
as an ordinary worker, if the CPGB’s
or indeed the Labour Party’s message
to me was ‘Vote for us: we will refuse
to take office’, I would look for some
other party to support, where my vote
was not going to be wasted!
In your article, you write: “Germany
and its close allies were never going
to consent to any form of debt relief
or repudiation, as that would set
a dangerous precedent - sparking
rebellion across Europe.” But there is
no reason to believe that is the case.
After all, there have already been
numerous haircuts of Greek debt, and
all economists recognise that the Greek
debt will have to be written off one way
or another anyway, because there is no
way Greece can repay it.
You are right to point out that the
reason why governments in Germany,
Spain, Portugal and Italy are opposed
to any rational resolution with Syriza
is that it will lead to similar calls from
the workers in their own countries.
But it’s precisely for that reason that
it was right for Syriza under the actual
conditions to have taken office, and put
that possibility on the table! Syriza’s
approach of calling its defeat a victory
is a serious mistake, but not a fatal one
at present, if it uses the interim to stress
that it was forced into this compromise,
and needs to build an opposition to
austerity across Europe. Then those
governments in Spain, Italy, Ireland
and Portugal would have reason to
worry. Already, even the German trade
unions have come out with a statement
opposing the harsh measures being
taken against Greece.
You state: “In other words, what
Germany is really worried about - quite
understandably from its own point of
view - is that the austerity regimes
imposed on Ireland, Portugal, Spain and
Italy could unravel. The latter country,
it goes without saying, is too big to fail
- if it did, that would be the end of the
euro zone.” This is completely wrong.
From a Marxist standpoint, what all of
this debt represents is not capital, but
fictitious capital, as Marx sets out in
Capital Vol 3. As fictitious capital it has
absolutely nothing to do with economic
capacity.
In fact, as Marx points out, quite the
opposite is the case. The build up of this
fictitious capital often stands in the way
of the accumulation of real productive
capital. The destruction of vast swathes
of this fictitious capital is in fact usually
a precondition for such accumulation.
A writing-off of all EU debt, in similar
vein, is a starting point for commencing
a programme of building real capital
across the EU, and thereby dealing
with the problems of low growth and
unemployment.
In 1939, in relation to Mexico,
Trotsky wrote: “Considerable
international capital is seeking areas
of investment at the present time,
even where only a modest (but sure)
return is possible. Turning one’s back
on foreign capital and speaking of
collectivisation and industrialisation is
mere intoxication with words.”
He points out that despite the
nationalisation of the oil companies
by the Cardenas regime, it would be
possible to attract foreign capital into
joint ventures, as Lenin had tried to do in
the Soviet Union. He goes on: “Despite
all these advantages [enjoyed by the
USSR] the industrial reconstruction of
the country was begun with the granting
of concessions. Lenin accorded great
importance to these concessions for the
economic development of the country
and for the technical and administrative
education of Soviet personnel. There
has been no socialist revolution in
Mexico. The international situation
does not even allow for the cancellation
of the public debt. The country, we
repeat, is poor. Under such conditions
it would be almost suicidal to close the
doors to foreign capital. To construct
state capitalism, capital is necessary.”
It’s clear here that the potential
for implementing even a minimum
programme was limited. What was
being proposed in Mexico was nothing
more than state-capitalist modernisation
and industrialisation, in conditions
not as favourable as those that exist
in Greece. Yet Trotsky quite rightly
does not suggest that Marxists could
simply walk away from intervening
in the situation, let alone arguing that
the government should be left to the
tender mercies of conservatives! In a
similar vein, later Trotsky addressed the
situation whereby the Cardenas regime
was encouraging the workers to exercise
a degree of workers’ control. Trotsky
wrote that Marxists cannot delude
workers with the belief that socialism
can be constructed by the capitalist
state undertaking nationalisations, and
handing the property to the workers;
nor, he argues, is it possible to have
real workers’ control without actual
workers’ ownership of the means of
production, and workers’ power in
society.
H o w e v e r, “ T h e b o u rg e o i s
government has itself carried through the
nationalisation and has been compelled
to ask participation of the workers in
the management of the nationalised
industry. One can, of course, evade the
question by citing the fact that unless
the proletariat takes possession of
the power, participation by the trade
unions in the management of the
enterprises of state capitalism cannot
give socialist results. However, such a
negative policy from the revolutionary
wing would not be understood by
the masses and would strengthen the
opportunist positions. For Marxists it
is not a question of building socialism
with the hands of the bourgeoisie, but
of utilising the situations that present
themselves within state capitalism and
advancing the revolutionary movement
of the workers.”
This is not a question of a Marxist
party making a bid for state power.
In fact Marxists have an important
role to play in making this clear. But
it is a serious mistake to believe that
it makes no difference whether a
Labour government is in power that
carries through a bourgeois social
democratic programme rather than
a Conservative government carrying
through a reactionary programme. If
Marxists would not argue that Labour
should not take office having won an
election in Britain, they should not
adopt a different position in relation to
Syriza in Greece.
Arthur Bough
email
Negative rates
A funny thing happened on the way to
the bourse last week. That Wednesday
morning, with lips pursed, a sign of
the times was duly written and issued:
the risk assessors showed their lack
of confidence in big banking capital.
Counterintuitively, lenders were paying
a borrower to take their money.
Well, it was the Börse, in fact. The
German state wanted some money,
so sold some debt, five-year bills,
auctioning them off. And the interest
rate? Well, the bidding didn’t go up,
it went down. And €3.3 billion was
racked in (enough to pay for the year
one spending of Syriza’s budget-neutral
programme advertised in last month’s
election). The deal was struck at not just
0.08% - for five years, remember - but
an average of negative 0.08%: for the
first time lenders were being charged
to park their money capital with the
German state.
Too often these days, capitalists get a
bad press. But people forget it’s not all
plain sailing when you have to navigate
the world, laden with money capital,
trying to find a business opportunity.
Even when the search is successful,
it’s often not easy to meet partners you
can trust, people you can invest with
your confidence. It’s a risky, nasty,
cut-throat world. So you need to build
relationships, and that takes time - and
time is money. Wouldn’t it be much
easier if there was something bigger
and safer than a bank that could help?
Having money capital carries
intrinsic risks, especially when it’s
not easy to find suitable investment
opportunities and you have to hang
on to it. Where to put it, who to trust?
That’s the crux. And it’s especially
vexing when highly experienced risk
assessors remind you that even the
biggest bank can implode, consuming
your money. Cue for an institution of
the state to step forward - or at least of
a reliable state. Time for trustworthy
treasuries to open their chests, offering
themselves as hosts, a haven from
stormy and turbulent seas. They present
themselves as capital’s protector of last
resort. This is public service at its best.
I’m not sure about this, but I
conjecture that something peculiar
happens when money capital is
subjected to negative nominal interest
rates. (In this German example, if there
were deflation of more than 0.08% then
the interest rate would be positive in real
terms, albeit nominally negative.) It’s
business as usual for the state because
it uses the money it gets sometimes
as capital, sometimes not, but for the
lenders, treasury bill in hand, their
post-shopping experience is somewhat
different. For them, unlike the state, the
nominal interest rate reduces the sum of
money: this is monetary destruction, of
its magnitude. (In comparison, there’s
only a destruction of its purchasing
power if the real interest rate is
negative - as it is for the owners of these
German bills in almost every country.)
Their money, advanced to the state,
is not accumulating: it is depleting,
disaccumulating, wasting away. In this
condition, does the lender’s money
retain its quality as a value (necessarily
in the form of abstract value)? Is it still
capital? If so, is the value magnitude
affected by monetary destruction?
Or, perhaps, is this magnitude only a
consequence of a change in the average
value magnitude of capital on the world
scale?
I conjecture that, the moment
the money capital is passed to the
borrower, part of it is stripped of
its social qualities of both value and
capital, and this coincides with the
enactment of monetary destruction of
the same magnitude. For the lender, the
money has stamped upon it a new social
character - a token, a promise to pay a
smaller sum at a future date. So from the
lender’s side - their self-understanding
is another matter - we have an event
(with two faces, just like a coin) and
a process:
 an instant refusal to socially
recognise that all the lent money bears
socially necessary labour time, thereby
enacting devaluation, the destruction of
part of the value born in and through
the money’s social relations;
 just as instantly there’s a social
recognition that, as some of the
money lacks value (necessarily in the
abstract form), that portion is pseudocapital, fictive capital, not capital at
all but simply money, and it enacts
a decapitalisation, a destruction, of
money capital; and
 this event initiates a period of
monetary destruction (lasting five
years, say), that necessarily proceeds
at a constant nominal rate.
The idea of negative nominal
interest rates doesn’t just leave Joe and
Joanna Blogs scratching their heads.
A world gone mad? Given the riches
of developed capitalism, in terms of
human flourishing rather than suffering,
as a necessary possibility, it is mad,
yes; but historically, as a contingent
necessity, in capitalist terms, no.
Insanity is sane. Sane capitalist practice
requires humanity to practise insanity.
The main thing to appreciate is
that this is the state we’ve come to:
capitalist life has become so risky,
even for capitalists, that paying to lend
makes sense - but not money - for the
lender. The money capitalist becoming
the money lender has come up against a
limit of capital and is paying the price.
But, necessarily, so do we, as either
variable capital or as citizen, and our
destruction is much more monstrous.
BCM Box 928, London WC1N 3XX l 020 7241 1756 l www.weeklyworker.co.uk l [email protected]
3
worker 1048 March 5 2015
weekly
Finally, two errors were made in
editing my letter in last week’s paper.
Firstly, Syriza polled 23% of the
electorate, not 36% as published. That
was a figure often in the press, but it
was their share of the valid votes cast.
Secondly, uncollected tax plus penalties
is €770 billion - not €700 billion, as
published. Apologies to all.
Jara Handala
email
Deniers
In his latest diatribe against those who
refuse to join in his vendetta against
Gilad Atzmon, Tony Greenstein baldly
equates those of Jewish origin who
express doubts about aspects of the
Nazi genocide with neo-Nazis like
the British National Party (Letters,
February 26).
If Greenstein were consistent in
this, he would also apply this logic
to the Arab world. Revulsion against
the justification of the oppression of
Palestinians by reference to the genocide
(an everyday retort to criticism in Israel
since 1947) has led to a scepticism about
the truth of the genocide among many
Palestinians and other Arabs. This has
been true for many decades. Prominent
Arab leaders, past and present, secular
and not, such as Gamal Abdul Nasser,
the Assads, the leadership of Hamas, the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, even
the current president of the Palestinian
Authority, Mahmood Abbas, have all
publicly either denied or expressed
doubts about the historicity of the Nazi
genocide. Not to mention prominent
non-Arab Muslim figures like the
Iranian leadership, particularly former
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
There is little doubt that the views of
these leaders reflect widespread public
opinion in that region.
The Zionists use the genocide as
a propaganda ‘trump card’ against
any and all criticism of their mass
ethnic-cleansing and terrorisation of
the Palestinians - an all-encompassing
argument that says, ‘No matter what
has been endured by the Arabs, what
happened to us is far worse. And the fact
that we Jews were victims of this much
worse crime and did not have a country
entitles us to the land we have taken.
Our allies in the west, who either were
responsible for, or did nothing to help
us in, our worst sufferings, owe us, and
must and will help us to maintain the
country we have taken from the Arabs.’
The obvious response of those on the
receiving end of barbarism and brutality
justified by this argument is to deny its
validity. And it is not an enormous step
from denying its validity to questioning
the truth of the historical event that is
used to underpin it. This syllogism may
horrify western liberals and leftists
who have been brought up on a diet
of guilt about what European antiSemites did to Jews, and a fair amount
of culturally conditioned contempt
for Arabs and Muslims as being
‘uncivilised’, ‘savage’ and generally
inferior. But in fact any people faced
with ongoing atrocities justified by a
similar propaganda narrative would
be 100% certain to challenge such a
narrative, and would also not care much
if there was an element of irrelevant
truth in it.
That is the real social and political
context in which views such as those
expressed by Atzmon were formed.
In fact, compared to many, Atzmon’s
remarks on the genocide may be
considered quite mild. The peculiarity
of Greenstein’s vendetta is that he
does not extend this Nazi-baiting
to the list of Arab and other Middle
Eastern leaders listed above. But,
if he did, he would sound just like a
crazed hasbarist, pushing the theses that
Arab and/or Muslim hostility to Israel
is fundamentally the same as Nazi
Jew-hatred.
Greenstein reserves his venom
for those Jews, such as Atzmon, who
have gone over to that essentially
Arab standpoint on the genocide.
Which really underlines the fact that
Greenstein’s politics are communalist.
He expresses, quite sincerely as far as
I can see, support for Arab rights and
opposition to Zionism. But he cannot
abide ‘traitorous’ Jews who cross over
outright to the Arab standpoint - as far
as he is concerned the question of the
oppression and dispossession of the
Palestinians and Israel’s reactionary
role is something that has to be
resolved by progressive Jews. Arabs
are supposed to play only an auxiliary
role. And woe betide anyone of Jewish
origin who transgresses against this.
I reject this nonsense, whether it is
applied to Arabs or people of Jewish
origin with similar views. This does
not flow from imperialist racism, as it
did with neo-Nazi supporters of Hitler,
but from a confused opposition to an
imperialist propaganda narrative. To
equate the two is a reactionary and
pro-imperialist position, in its real
logic. I am in favour, as a revolutionary
socialist, of fraternal debate, as well
as joint struggle, with those resisting
Zionist imperialism who hold this
view, as with those who hold any other
mistaken anti-imperialist view.
It is absurd that Greenstein can in
one phrase admit that he characterised
someone who wanted to attend a
meeting of the Socialist Workers
Party, an organisation clearly within
the workers’ movement, as a ‘scab’
for intending to cross a ‘picket line’
he intended to erect against an SWP
meeting that hosted Atzmon, and then
in the next breath deny that this implied
a threat of force or violence.
Greenstein, and everyone else on
the left, knows full well that workers
are fully entitled to enforce respect for
genuine picket lines in an industrial
dispute by physical force, if they must.
Any socialists who did not defend the
right of workers to do this would be
a miserable, pacifist trend. Equating
such a protest outside a left political
meeting with an industrial picket
carried an implied threat of physical
force against the (SWP) organisers of
the meeting. That is why Greenstein
was compelled to apologise in short
order after he uttered it.
But the fact that he still defends and
justifies this usage even today shows
that his real position is to no-platform
Atzmon and to encourage strong-arm
methods against anyone who opposes
his anathema. Since that now includes
George Galloway, one hopes he might
realise how irrational and untenable his
campaign has become.
Ian Donovan
Communist Explorations
Political choice
There is a lot in Mike Macnair’s
‘Wrong kind of radicalisation’
(February 26) with which I agree, not
least the suggestion that the attraction
of Islamic State is a consequence of
the failure of the left, including its
failure to advance class politics in the
Stop the War movement.
However, some of Mike’s
arguments I cannot accept. The concept
of umma (the Muslim community) is
no different from the idea of the le’om
(the Jewish people) - see Shlomo
Sands’ The invention of the Jewish
people, p24. In practice, this idea
falls down at the first whiff of heresy
or class struggle. IS’s concept of umma
involves the wholesale butchering
of Shi’ite Muslims and an attack on
the very idea of Arab unity against
imperialism and Zionism.
The attraction of IS and political
Islam/Salafism is a political choice
for the girls who have gone to
become Jihadi brides. IS may appeal
to a limited Muslim solidarity, but
that is no less true with respect to
Zionism, British fascism or German
volkish politics. The question is what
type of politics do they represent? Is
it one which embraces humanity or
one which trumpets the superiority
of a particular segment? It may be,
like Zionism, a reflection of Arab
oppression, but that does not make it
any the less dangerous.
Traditional fascism, with its belief
in Kinder, Küche, Kirche, was also
attractive to women who wished for
a positive affirmation of their role
within the family. A number of leading
suffragettes/Women’s Social and
Political Union later joined Oswald
Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, as
their ‘feminism’ was outweighed by
their class solidarity, just as the ‘antiimperialism’ of IS is overtaken by their
reactionary religious attachment.
We should not shy away from
fierce political criticism of IS. They
were (are?) funded by the Saudi and
Gulf rulers and armed by the United
States. There are a number of reports
of Israeli support for IS, including
hospital treatment for its wounded,
and the missile attack on Hezbollah
fighters recently can only be seen in the
context of the war between Hezbollah
and Iran, on the one side, and IS and
the al-Nusra Front, on the other.
On another topic - the recent
exchanges with Ian Donovan - I have
informed the editor of the Weekly
Worker that I have no intention of
responding to any further letters which
indulge in ad hominem attacks, as I
don’t wish to feed what is clearly a
personal obsession.
Tony Greenstein
Brighton
No thanks
Pete McLaren’s offer of taking an
average worker’s wage in the unlikely
event of becoming a Trade Unionist and
Socialist Coalition MP is frankly naive.
He claims that £25,000 is more
than enough for anyone to live on.
Really? Here in the south-east, it is
nowhere near enough. If a worker is
lucky enough to earn said 25 grand
- more likely 13 grand (= minimum
wage) - after deductions, this becomes
around £17,500, based on 40 hours
per week, As rent for a two-bed flat is
about £1,200 per month in the private
sector, this leaves around fuck all to
pay for food and utilities.
The working class is falling behind
the rich at a rapid pace and what we
don’t need are childish gestures. It
doesn’t matter what you earn, it’s
what action you take as an MP and,
if you are a socialist one on £65,000
per annum, then you should be in the
house fighting for the same amount as
a minimum for the rest of us.
Thanks, Tusc, but no thanks. I
think I will vote Labour this time. At
least there’s a chance of getting the
minimum wage up to £8 per hour.
Tony Roberts
email
RIP, comrades
Readers of the Weekly Worker may
be saddened to learn of the deaths
of comrade Dick Donnelly of the
Socialist Party of Great Britain’s
Glasgow branch and Paul Breeze, both
in February. Dick Donnelly had been a
member of the SPGB since the 1950s
and key figure of Glasgow branch. He
wrote, debated and spoke extensively
for the party.
In 1960, Donnelly jumped onto the
stage after a CPGB celebration of the
40th anniversary of the Daily Worker
(led by editor George Matthews), for
Donnelly to denounce and ridicule
the Communist Party. Despite all the
hostility of the CPers, Donnelly routed
and exposed the record of their party
and their Stalin-worship, reducing
them to a sullen silence.
Paul Breeze wrote for the SPGB
in the 1970s, but left over the use of
the traditional language of ‘socialism’,
‘capitalism’, ‘working class’, etc.
After he left, he wrote and published
a pamphlet in the 1980s called A world
of free access, which set out the case
for socialism without using the word.
He wrote two novels and became a
twice-elected independent councillor
and deputy mayor in Stoke-on-Trent.
Jon D White
SPGB
CPGB podcasts
Every Monday we upload a podcast commenting on the current
political situation. In addition, the site features voice files of public
meetings and other events: http://cpgb.org.uk/home/podcasts.
London Communist Forum
Sunday March 8, 5pm: Weekly political report from CPGB
Provisional Central Committee, followed by open discussion and
Capital reading group. Calthorpe Arms, 252 Grays Inn Road, London
WC1. This meeting: Vol 2, chapter 1: ‘The circuit of money capital’.
Organised by CPGB: www.cpgb.org.uk.
Radical Anthropology Group
Introduction to anthropology
Tuesday March 10, 6.30pm: ‘An Aboriginal Australian myth: the
rainbow snake’. Speaker: Chris Knight.
Cock Tavern, 23 Phoenix Road, London NW1. Talks are free, small
donations welcome.
Organised by Radical Anthropology Group:
http://radicalanthropologygroup.org
Life of Claudia Jones
Friday March 6, 6pm: Evening of music, images and comment,
Congress House, Great Russell Street, London WC1. Remembering
US black campaigner for freedom Claudia Jones.
Organised by South East Region TUC Race Relations Committee:
[email protected].
Raise the roof for housing
Saturday March 7, 11am to 4.30pm: Conference, Quaker Meeting
House, 22 School Lane, Liverpool L1.
Organised by Left Unity: http://leftunity.org.
Blacklist Support Group
Saturday March 7, 1pm: AGM and national construction rank and
file meeting, Jurys Inn, 80 Jamaica Street, Glasgow G1. All blacklisted
workers welcome to attend and vote.
Organised by Blacklist Support Group:
www.facebook.com/groups/blacklistSG.
Time to act!
Saturday March 7, 1pm: National march to halt climate change.
Assemble Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Kingsway, London WC2, for march to
Parliament Square, London SW1.
Organised by Campaign Against Climate Change:
http://www.campaigncc.org/TimetoAct.
Long march back
Sunday March 8, 11am: Remembering the end of the miners’ Great
Strike, Broadway Hotel, Broadway, Dunscroft, Doncaster.
Organised by Hatfield Main NUM: www.minersadvice.co,uk
Socialist films
Sunday March 8, 11am: Screening, Bolivar Hall, 54 Grafton Way,
London W1. José Luis Garcia Sánchez’s María Querida (Spain,
91 minutes) and Octavia Foundation for Young People’s Hidden
herstories: Claudia Jones (UK, 15 minutes). Followed by discussion.
Organised by London Socialist Film Co-op:
www.socialistfilm.blogspot.com.
No to war
Monday March 9, 7.30pm: Brent Stop the War AGM, Rumi’s Cave,
26 Willesden Lane, London NW6. Speaker: Jeremy Corbyn MP.
Organised by Stop the War Coalition: www.stopwar.org.uk.
Women’s TUC
Wednesday March 11 to Friday March 13, 10am to 5pm:
Conference for female activists, TUC Congress House, 28 Great
Russell Street, London WC1.
Organised by Trade Union Congress:
www.tuc.org.uk/equality-issues/gender-equality/tuc-womens-conference.
International Women’s Day
Friday March 13, 6pm: Turkish celebration, Kervan Banqueting
Suite, 293 Fore Street, London N9.
Organised by Anatolian People’s Cultural Centre:
[email protected].
John Lilburne anniversary
Saturday March 14, 11am to 9pm: Conference, Bishopsgate
Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2. In honour of the Leveller,
John Lilburne. £12 (£10 concessions).
Organised by Bishopsgate Institute: www.bishopsgate.org.uk.
Palestine: the tipping point
Saturday March 14, 10am to 4pm: action meeting and workshops,
School of Oriental and African Studies, Vernon Square campus,
Penton Rise, London WC1.
Organised by Palestine Solidarity Campaign:
www.palestinecampaign.org.
Greece and the European left
Saturday March 14, 2pm: Meeting, room OC-MR02, Octagon
Centre, Sheffield University, Clarkson Street, Sheffield S10. Speaker:
Joana Ramirom, Morning Star journalist and Left Unity national
council member.
Organised by Sheffield Left Unity:
http://sheffieldleftunity.blogspot.co.uk.
Nato and Ukraine crisis
Thursday March 19, 6.30pm: Public meeting and anti-war
discussion, Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, Shaftesbury Avenue,
London WC2.
Organised by Stop the War Coalition: www.stopwar.org.uk.
CPGB wills
Remember the CPGB and keep the struggle going. Put our party’s
name and address, together with the amount you wish to leave, in your
will. If you need further help, do not hesitate to contact us.
4
March 5 2015 1048 worker
weekly
Left Unity
Aims, deals and recommendations
Jack Conrad reports from the Communist Platform’s steering committee
Why vote CP
Our main emphasis is not on positions,
but conducting the battle of ideas. We
seek to win a clear majority in Left Unity
to the Marxist programme of extreme
democracy and establishing working
class power first and foremost in
Europe - the decisive point of departure
for the global transition to communism.
Ideas of “saving capitalism from itself”
(Yanis Varoufakis) and a return to some
Keynesian golden age are in our opinion
as illusory as they are reactionary.
Nevertheless, it would surely
be a good thing if the Communist
Platform increased its representation
on the national council. As is widely
recognised, our comrade, Yassamine
Mather, has played an invaluable
role over the last year. Even those
who disagree with us over this or that
secondary question would therefore be
well advised to vote for our list.
Already the Communist Platform
has helped defeat attempts to water
down Left Unity’s anti-imperialist
principles. Eg, Socialist Resistance
wanted to provide a ‘leftwing’ excuse
for further US-UK ‘humanitarian’
interventions in the Middle East.
Likewise today we militantly oppose
any blurring of the distinction between
the petty bourgeois politics of the
Green Party and the socialist politics
of the working class.
Of course, within Left Unity the
Communist Platform is committed to
openness, democracy, accountability
and radical change. In line with the
constitution all our Communist
Platform meetings are reported. That
includes dealing with differences
and sharp arguments (eg, when we
expelled Ian Donovan because of
his retrogressive attitude towards
Jews). In the same spirit of openness
our comrades regularly write about
Left Unity’s branches, national
council meetings, conferences, etc.
That a comrade, Laurie McCauley,
© Peter Marsh
W
e have agreed to stand
a limited number of
candidates in Left Unity’s
internal elections. The Communist
Platform is presenting a full slate
for the 15 nationally elected seats.
However, as with last year, none of
our comrades will be standing for any
of the committees or officer positions.
Nor, for that matter, apart from
London, are we fielding full slates
for Left Unity’s regions. And, apart
from the youth and student caucuses,
we have, at least for the moment, no
plans to intervene organisationally
within LU’s other sections - disabled,
women, black, LGBTQ, etc.
Voting is, of course, by email.
The ballot was officially supposed to
open on Tuesday March 3 (however
because of a cock-up voting was
delayed), and is once again officially
due to close at 11.59pm on Friday
March 23. The results will be
announced four days later. Members
have before them something near a
hundred candidates and are expected
to select from them 10 officers, 15
national council members as well
as the disputes, standing orders, etc,
committees. A big ask.
As we have repeatedly argued,
this voting system is surely an
internalisation of the defeats suffered
by the trade union movement in
the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher’s
government made postal ballots a legal
requirement. Naturally, at the time, the
left opposed what was an attempt to
neuter trade union militancy. Instead
we championed voting at branch
meetings, conferences, etc. Those
standing for election could therefore
be asked awkward questions and
inevitably answers informed choices.
Best way to vote: in meetings, not by email
can be permanently suspended from
Manchester Left Unity for such a
‘crime’ is surely an outrage. The fact
that our disputes committee has proved
either unwilling or unable to right this
disgraceful wrong can only but repel
potential recruits. No office-holder, no
political faction in Left Unity should
be above criticism.
The present system, whereby
a largely atomised membership
elects the 10 national officers,
appears democratic. But in reality it
encourages Bonapartist egos, lessens
our effectiveness and prevents proper
accountability. On the one hand,
national officers who do not perform
prominent public roles could be doing
perfectly competent jobs. On the other
hand, they might be unmitigated
disasters. There are rumours and dryas-dust minutes. But most members
find themselves completely in the dark.
Far better to have indirect elections
- the election of officers by what is
supposed to be our central leadership
body. The national council should have
the power to appoint, monitor and if
necessary recall officers.
To facilitate that the national council
must be reduced in size … it also needs
to meet at least monthly. At present the
national council is totally dysfunctional.
Far too many NC members fail to
attend: eg, the February 28 meeting
saw just over half its members turn
up. Meanwhile, papers, motions and
amendments often go unread. Political
and organisational amateurism rules.
Agendas are overstuffed, are hardly ever
completed. Major decisions are therefore
taken elsewhere. By the 10 officers or
even unofficial groupings of officers and
their factional associates. Obviously all
this is highly unsatisfactory.
Every Communist Platform
candidate backs the call for a
constitutional conference in 2015.
Clearly our existing constitution is
unfit for purpose. Root-and-branch
change is urgently needed.
Besides national council members
elected by the entire membership, the
Communist Platform is supporting a
full slate of 10 in the London region.
We are also standing Tina Becker in
Yorkshire and Humberside and David
Isaacson in the South East. Vote for
them all in the recommended order vital with the single transferable vote
system.
ISN candidates
We have been approached by Nick
Wrack on behalf of the Independent
Socialist Network to come to some
sort of non-aggression pact, some
sort of accommodation, perhaps
even run a joint slate. Given that
the ISN is a recognised component
part of the Trade Unionist and
Socialist Coalition, is based on the
politics of fudge, is unanchored
programmatically and is fielding a
number of candidates who have a
record on the left which renders them
unsuitable to serve on the leadership
of any kind of socialist organisation,
the Communist Platform rejected
all such suggestions. The fact
that comrade Wrack was vaguely
talking about extending his coalition
to include the social-imperialist
Alliance for Workers’ Liberty closed
the matter as far as we are concerned.
There are worthwhile people in
the ISN, but there are also philistine
muddleheads. There are the sincere,
but there are also scoundrels. For
example, Chris Strafford and John
Pearson. The first is Manchester
LU secretary. He took the lead in
suspending comrade McCauley
and then defending what is a gross
violation of elementary democracy:
ie, banning the freedom to criticise.
Then there is comrade Pearson. He
is not only standing for the national
council, but aspires to become
our nominations officer. However,
comrade Pearson was expelled from
the Campaign for a Marxist Party in
2008 for threatening to “lamp” a fellow
CMP member. Comrade Pearson did
not take kindly to being criticised.
Despite strenuous efforts by Hillel
Ticktin, myself and others, comrade
Pearson refused to express the slightest
contrition. Indeed he adamantly
claimed to be fully justified. Naturally
then, he arrogantly rejected all offers
of mediation and requests for him to
withdraw the threat of violence and
apologise. If he had, I for one would
have forgiven and forgotten. But he
steadfastly refused.
Nevertheless, as a gesture of good
will, we have put two ISNers towards
the top of our recommended list for
the 15 nationally elected NC members.
Given our modest but real strength,
this support will give them a boost. We
might have our differences with Toby
Abse and Chris Cassells. But they are
principled leftwingers, they are also
primarily committed to Left Unity, as
opposed to Tusc. We are also calling
for a vote for Dave Landau in London;
and for Matthew Jones in Scotland and
Dave Parks in the South West, who
should be given the first preference
vote. The Communist Platform hopes
that the ISN will reciprocate, but we
are not relying upon it.
Whereas the Communist Platform
is democratic, well organised and
disciplined, the ISN is a veritable
swamp. In other words, whereas the
Communist Platform can, and will,
deliver 100% of its members to vote
for whatever our steering committee
recommends, the same is unlikely to
be the case with the ISN.
A number of ISNers hope to
become national officers. Besides
comrade Pearson, Nick Wrack is
standing for national secretary, Pete
McLaren for media officer, and Ed
Potts and Will McMahon as principal
speakers. Rather than giving a hard
and fast recommendation in relation
to these and other candidates, our
steering committee thinks we should
ask all comrades standing for officer
positions and on the regional lists to
answer the following questions. If
their replies are satisfactory, and can
be judged honest and upfront, it would
be right to vote for them.
1. Do you publicly criticise all
calls, manifestos and organisations
calling for a British withdrawal
from the European Union? Will you
publicly advocate the programme
of establishing working class power
throughout Europe?
2. Do you oppose the idea of forming
some kind of bloc within Left Unity that
includes the social-imperialist AWL?
Should those who support the pro-Nato
government of Petro Poroshenko, who
refuse to condemn the 2003 invasion
of Iraq or the possibility of an Israeli
nuclear strike against Iran be considered
legitimate bloc partners?
3. Do you give priority to Left Unity
or Tusc? Do you agree that Tusc is
a diversionary Labour Party mark II
project?
4. Do you support openness and
accountability? Do you consider
reporting and commenting on Left
Unity officers, branches, regions,
national council, conferences, etc,
perfectly normal and acceptable? Will
you publicly condemn the suspension
of Laurie McCauley? Do you demand
his immediate reinstatement?
5. Do you disassociate yourself from
those who resort to violence or threats
of violence within the left? Will you
insist that anyone found guilty of
making such threats issue a public
apology, no matter how belatedly?
6. Do you think Left Unity should
draw a clear red line between the
socialist politics of the working class
and the petty bourgeois politics of the
Green Party?
7. Do you support the call for a Left
Unity constitutional conference in
2015? l
We urge comrades to vote in the
following order of preference
Directly elected
1. Yassamine Mather
2. Jack Conrad
3. Tina Becker
4. Chris Cassells
5. Toby Abse
6. Moshé Machover
7. Mike Macnair
8. David Isaacson
9. Sarah McDonald
10. Robert Eagleton
11. Lee Rock
12. Peter Manson
13. Daniel Gray
14. Maciej Zurowski
15. Mark Lewis
Regions
London
1. Daniel Gray
2. Sarah McDonald
3. Emily Orford
4. James Turley
5. Tom Morley
6. Simon Wells
7. Maciej Zurowski
8. Moshé Machover
9. Phil Railston
10. Dave Landau
South East
1. David Isaacson
South West
1. Dave Parks
Yorkshire and Humber
1. Tina Becker
Scotland
1. Matthew Jones
Support for other candidates should be based on their responses to the
seven questions listed in article
5
worker 1048 March 5 2015
weekly
Amendments galore, seats decided
Yassamine Mather reports on the February 28 meeting of the national council
T
he last meeting of the 2014-15
national council of Left Unity
was efficient and useful despite
the usual hugely crammed agenda. On
the general election alone, the NC had
to finalise the manifesto, taking into
account 38 proposed amendments,
and discuss and approve nominations
for Left Unity candidates, including
those standing jointly with the Trade
Unionist and Socialist Coalition.
Because of time considerations,
however, motions critical of the
officers’ ‘Appeal for an alliance
against austerity’ were deferred to the
next meeting.
Effective chairing and the fact
that most (not all) of the 30 or so NC
comrades present had done their work,
reading the motions, reports and papers
sent beforehand, meant the meeting
had sufficient time to discuss feedback
from Left Unity members and branches
regarding the party’s manifesto and
cover the rest of the agenda. A historic
first for Left Unity!
On the manifesto, an amendment
was moved to that part of the
introduction which read: “Radical
measures are necessary to ensure
a transformation in the economic
structure and a reversal of this damage.
We believe that there is no longer any
prospect of the Labour Party being
prepared to do this, as it has embraced
neoliberalism and austerity.”
Barnet branch had proposed the
following addition: “Left Unity is the
only broad socialist party to the left of
Labour - the Greens do not say they
are for an end to capitalism and for
socialism.” This amendment was lost
by a single vote - a shame, as many
comrades share the Barnet branch’s
concerns about the officers’ proposed
anti-austerity alliance with the Green
Party. If Left Unity is to be trusted as a
serious alternative to existing political
parties, it should not be swayed by spikes
in polls or media publicity. Such poll
ratings are often immediate reactions
to press and TV coverage of a party
or party leader. How can we be taken
seriously if we appear to be so vulnerable
to fluctuations in the way the bourgeois
mass media presents its coverage?
A number of proposals by Lambeth
branch were accepted by the meeting,
with a varying number of votes. For
example, there was a proposal to
change the sentence which read: “We
will never vote for cuts or compromise
our principles by participating in
coalitions with capitalist parties.”
The amendment replaced “never” with
“not” and unfortunately the meeting
voted to adopt the new formulation,
although a number of comrades voted
against and others abstained. The use
of the world “never” is important
because most voters are disillusioned
by political parties of the left changing
their stance on basic issues, such as
cuts and austerity, as soon as they come
to power. Coalitions with capitalist
parties have heralded disaster for many
European left parties and by changing
the wording Left Unity has taken the
first steps towards such a compromise.
A proposal to add the following
sentences to the section on public
ownership was defeated: “We would
legislate to create in every large
company a supervisory board on which
directors elected by the workforce and
the community would have a majority.
This board would appoint and control
the managers and all company policy.”
The meeting also voted against
inserting the following sentence to the
section on tax and corporations: “Most
government debt has been repaid many
times over in interest payments from
our taxes. We would over a period of
five years cancel all such debt and stop
interest payments except for those
surveillance, it was a good idea to
strengthen LU’s opposition to the ‘war
on terror’: This section now reads:
The war on terror is being used to
create scapegoats and persecute
communities and has become a
‘catch-all’ law with a chilling effect
on political dissent. It is bound up
with racism and imperialism.
We are in favour of repealing
all anti-terror legislation, ending
all collaboration with foreign
governments fighting the so-called
war on terror and for the arrest of
anyone involved in torture, rendition
or other crimes against humanity.
There must be no more detentions
without trial or secret trials.
government bonds held by workers’
pension funds.”
The housing section was already
quite long and lengthy amendments
would have made it even longer.
But the meeting was glad to vote
for a composite formulated by Tom
Walker, which added a pithy sentence
based on Lambeth’s proposal. Some
shorter, more imprecise proposals were
accepted unanimously, including an
amendment calling for May 1 to be
declared a public holiday. Others were
rejected almost unanimously.
There was a proposal to delete
“Immigration controls divide and
weaken the working class and are
therefore against the interests of
all workers”; and replace it with:
“Immigration controls divide and
weaken us and are therefore against the
interests of us all.” This was rejected,
as well as another attempt to remove
the term “working class” from the
sentence: “Working class people, of
whatever background, have a shared
interest in defeating the racists.”
Clearly there is a need for some
general education here. Karl Marx
defined the working class as being
made up of individuals who sell their
labour-power for wages and who do
not own the means of production.
Irrespective of whether they are bluecollar or white-collar, working in
the service sector or in education or
hospitals, they are all working class.
In fact the majority of the people often
referred to by the media as ‘middle
income’ or ‘middle class’ are in fact
working class.
None of this has anything to do
with a person’s origins. Someone
born into a working class family who
subsequently becomes a capitalist
living off the surplus value of his/
her employees is not working class.
Clearly some members of Left Unity
have swallowed capitalist propaganda
about who is and who is not working
class and their non-Marxist views
regarding class allegiance and class
origin must be addressed. Thankfully,
however, the overwhelming majority
of the NC voted for keeping the term
“working class” in the manifesto.
Another Lambeth proposal was
accepted. It read: “Close down all
immigration detention centres like
Yarl’s Wood and Harmondsworth.
We are for the prosecution of all
immigration or security officers
involved in physical and sexual
assaults on those detained or the
murder of deportees.”
The same was true of the following
addition to the section on ‘End the war
on terror at home’. Given the current
political situation in the Middle
East and calls for increased police
A combined proposal from Dorset,
Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Lambeth
clarified support for Palestine - a
position that hopefully will deter soft
Zionists and social-imperialists from
joining Left Unity:
“Left Unity stands in solidarity with
the Palestinian people in their struggle
against oppression and dispossession.
To this end, Left Unity supports the call
by scores of Palestinian organisations
(including all Palestinian trade unions)
for a campaign of boycott, divestment
and sanctions against Israel until it
complies with its obligations under
international law.”
Conference has not yet discussed
the UK constitution, but the previous
NC meeting had spent some time
formulating this section of the
manifesto. Reading branch had
proposed an amendment which read:
“Delete all references to abolishing the
monarchy.” You will be pleased to hear
that this was heavily defeated.
Comrade Walker’s composite of
various additional amendments in this
section was accepted. It read:
The royal family’s enormous wealth,
land and palaces should be put to
social use. The same applies to the
aristocracy and their mansions.
The Church of England must be
disestablished, its privileges ended
and its wealth confiscated.
The first-past-the-post, single
constituency system must be
replaced with proportional
representation. We support the
right of prisoners to vote. Local
democracy should be restored,
with powers returned to councils
and democratic control of schools,
hospitals and housing.
In the afternoon session the meeting
discussed the rest of the agenda and
a number of new motions/proposals
were deferred to the scheduled April
18 meeting of the new NC.
Amongst them was a proposal from
Felicity Dowling on ‘safe spaces’. I
will discuss this issue more fully in
a separate article, but for now let me
say that comrade Dowling is incorrect
when she states: “Safe spaces policy
was discussed at two conferences
without clear outcome.”
The November conference defeated
the proposed ‘safe spaces’ policy,
and the alternative code of conduct
proposed by the Communist Platform
received more votes (65, as against
61, with 36 comrades failing to
support either alternative). However,
conference then voted against ratifying
the code of conduct by 79 votes to
68. Surely then it is more accurate to
describe the ‘safe spaces’ policy than
the code of conduct as the ‘minority
view’. The “clear outcome” was that
‘safe spaces’ was defeated. At times
it seems as though some comrades
inhabit a parallel universe.
The draft proposal from Steve
Freeman’s constitution commission was
also rejected. The document contains
some interesting statements, including
sections adopted from Tony Benn’s
1991 Commonwealth of Britain Bill.
However, as comrade Simon Hardy
argued, it is a proposal for an English
constitution, with no reference to
Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
I pointed out that comrade Freeman
No magic bullet
R
egrettably, the February 28
Yorkshire regional committee
meeting of Left Unity, held in
scenic York, cannot be described as
positively as the previous meeting in
Sheffield, or the inaugural meeting
in Leeds. Reduced attendance from
fewer branches resulted in just four
delegates and three observers.
Business began with updates
on the activity of branches in the
period since the November regional
committee meeting. The split
between the two Leeds branches
has moved on by a microscopic
degree, with one branch (allegedly
dominated by Workers Power)
apparently now referring to itself as
Leeds Central, rather than simply
Leeds. Meanwhile, Leeds North had
held a reasonably successful meeting
in support of the Keep the NHS
Public campaign, with around 25
attending.
Comrades from York branch
seemed upbeat, having added
a couple of new faces to their
number, while Sheffield has set up
a Left Unity student society at the
university. I reported that, although
things have been a little quiet since
the new year, our AGM is to be
held shortly and on March 14 we
have organised a public meeting on
Greece and the European Union,
when the speaker will be LU national
council member and Morning Star
journalist, Joana Ramiro.
Reporting on recent national
meetings he had attended, Matthew
Caygill told a familiar story:
overpacked agendas and executive
meetings which go over the same
ground for the benefit of EC
members who have been rotated in.
The lack of political direction of the
organisation as a whole was brought
up in relation to this and a York
comrade commented that the current
balance between leadership and
democracy seems to hamper efficient
organisation.
When I commented to York
comrades that I disagreed with their
decision to support non-working
class candidates in the shape of the
Green Party in the upcoming general
election, they mostly took it in
good spirit. But for Garth Franklin
of Socialist Resistance this was
indicative of simple wrong thinking
on my part. “Your problem,” he told
me, was that I didn’t “think like
a Left Unity member” (or rather
how he thinks a Left Unity member
should think). I replied that this was
an Orwellian idea, which implied
that there was a prescribed way
of thinking for all of us. Comrade
Caygill seemed to agree with our SR
friend, but when others took my side
he performed a rapid about-turn and
told comrade Franklin that perhaps it
was a bad thing to say after all.
Comrade Franklin was also in fine
form later, when he started another
as convenor had not consulted other
members of the commission since the
November conference. The NC decided
that the commission would benefit from
more consultation and the appointment
of a co-convenor alongside comrade
Freeman.
The social security commission’s
proposal were also debated. Quite a lot
of work had gone into this report and
the meeting decided to add members
to the commission in preparation for a
workshop/conference on this subject.
The final part of the meeting was
taken up with a discussion of our
candidates for the general election.
An emergency motion submitted by
Waltham Forest regarding Bristol
West, where the local LU branch is
standing in a Green Party-targeted seat,
was defeated. The meeting confirmed
a decision made at the last NC to
accept Bristol’s decision to stand in
this constituency, The vote to support
Bristol was a clear indication that the
call for an anti-austerity alliance with
the Greens has little support on the NC.
However, the discussion on general
election candidates raised the issue
of central versus local decisions - an
important subject that needs to be
addressed, hopefully by the April
NC. Having said that, we approved all
nine LU or LU/Tusc candidates who
had been locally adopted - though the
number may change before the general
election nomination deadline.
I have a lot of sympathy with NC
members who expressed concern about
comrades who are more Tusc than Left
Unity. The sudden reappearance at their
local branch by some candidates, who
had already been nominated by Tusc,
is not ideal. Left Unity has principled
positions on a number of issues and,
unlike Tusc, it is not a Eurosceptic
formation. Also unlike Tusc, it has
very clear policies against immigration
controls. It is up to these joint LU-Tusc
comrades to convince us where their
prime loyalty lies l
[email protected]
intervention with: “Listen to me,
young man …”! Again, those in the
room who could be described as ‘left
of Labour, but not Marxist’ found
this immensely patronising. Perhaps
they also found it ironic that the
Communist Platform supporter at the
meeting had turned out to be cordial
and comradely, unlike those most
opposed to our supposedly sectarian
wrecking activity. Later on comrade
Caygill restated his suspicion of the
‘secretive’ CPGB, with its collective
decision-making and disciplined
actions, finding it out of place in a
party like Left Unity. He criticised
comrades like me for always needing
to be told what to do and think.
The Greens came up again
later, in relation to the LU officers’
‘Appeal for an alliance against
austerity’. One York comrade said
that the Green Party stood in positive
contrast to the Marxist sects. Indeed,
it was almost as though Marx and
Lenin were reaching out from
their graves to keep their followers
stuck in the distant past. Comrade
Franklin went on to comment that
every organisation coming out of
Trotskyism - including his own - has
failed completely, and that reaching
out to new forces, especially the
60,000-strong Green membership,
was of key importance. Apparently
that is why it is correct to call for a
Green vote l
Mike Copestake
6
March 5 2015 1048 worker
weekly
International Women’s day
Against feminism, for the working class
T
hese extracts from
a Geraldine Duffy
International Women’s
Day supplement in the
March 1985 issue of The
Leninist ‑ forerunner
of the Weekly Worker obviously had political
limitations. But, for all its
occasional roughness, it
drew real strength from the
inspiring, living example
of the Women Against Pit
Closures movement. As
comrade Duffy wrote in
her intro, “our thoughts for all working class
and hopes [went] out to women” they provided.
the fighting women in the
Mark Fischer
mining communities” and
the “magnificent example [email protected]
Women take sides
They talk about statistics,
about the price of coal.
The cost of our community
is dying on the dole.
In fighting for our future
we’ve found ways to organise.
Where women’s liberation failed
to move,
this strike has mobilised.1
The message in this verse sparked
the latest round in the debate over
the women’s question within the
Communist Party. In general terms the
party is deeply riven and this expresses
itself in a particularly vivid way over
the question of women. It was comrade
Barbara McDermot who quoted the
song in a pointed article in the Star
arguing that women mobilised by the
miners’ strike owed nothing to the
women’s liberation move­ment.
The barb was caught by the femi­
nists in the party, whose response to
comrade McDermot was very much
a defensive one. The replies to her
article in Communist Focus (the
Euros’ factional paper for conducting
inner-party struggle) demonstrate that
the role of women in the miners’ strike
is indeed a ticklish theme for the
feminists. The best counter-argument
that this trend have come up with
is that the pit women’s movement
would have been impossible without
the increased confidence given to all
women by the women’s liberation
movement of the 1970s: “The
growth of a women’s movement in
the coalfields ... would have been
inconceivable without the changes
brought about in women’s confidence
and in the circumstances of women by
the women’s liberation movement.”2
This is the sort of distortion that
has been used by feminists since their
emergence. At the beginning of the
century bourgeois women began to
struggle to enter the professions and
the obstructions put in their path gave
rise to “‘feminism’ - the attempt of
bourgeois women to stand together
and pit their common strength against
the enemy, against men”.3
…
Peaceful women?
The women who were demon­
strating at [Greenham Common]
were bringing to our notice the
moods they share privately: a
capacity to nurse and nourish,
to care, tolerate, improve and
preserve and demonstrate a set of
values contrary to the machismo
of men now insanely conquering
outer space in phallic warships and
pre­occupied with phallic mis­siles.4
The idea peddled by the
Greenham protest is that women
are naturally peaceful and men
naturally aggressive. In itself this
is a dangerous notion, but what
is much more dangerous is when
others peddle the same politics
under the name of ‘communism’
and seek to direct the struggle of
working women in this direction.
These women emphasise women’s
stereotyped role as life-givers,
adorning the fences of Greenham
with baby clothes, children’s toys
and family photos. But in reality
there is no natural connection
that “The police are just as violent
with the women and children as they
are with the men.”7
For working class women who
want genuine peace a war with the
forces of law and order in Britain is
unavoidable - pit women have already
experienced this. To deny this lesson
and instead to promote Greenhamtype activity is a crime against the
working class. Greenham not only
glorifies a view of women which
derives from the inferior position of
women in bourgeois society; it also
presents a view of ‘peace’ as the
status quo in a society whose nature
can never mean true peace for the
working class. Working class women
also care about their children, but
they cannot afford peace at any price,
which is why their place is not with
bourgeois women, but alongside men
in fighting capitalist oppression.
Class lines
‘Women workers, take up your rifles’
between gender and violence; the
classic modern-day example of this
fact presents itself in the form of
our prime minister - one of the most
vicious leaders this country has seen
in a long while.
Feminist organisations have a
history of pacifism, but when war
breaks out everyone has to take sides
and class forces tend to polarise;
when it comes to this choice,
feminists have a bad record. The fact
that these women’s movements have
been dominated by bourgeois ideas
has led them to take the side of that
class from 1914 to Ireland today ....
So, while there is no natural
connection between violence
and gender, there is a connection
between pacifism and feminism.
Both movements are led by middle
class individualists who reject
working class politics and working
class violence. Trapped between the
picket line violence and the violence
of the police, they express the view
of an ‘innocent bystander’.
The most tragic feature of all this
is that such views have taken root
in the party. Thus comrades Bea
Campbell and Janie Glen condemned
the violence used by the Warrington
pickets in the National Graphical
Association dispute5 and, throwing
caution to the wind, comrade Glen
also condemned miners’ violence
as ‘male’. For example, in a recent
article in Focus Glen poses the
“question of the difference in the
amount of violence at Greenham
and on the miners’ picket lines”;
the answer she comes up with is
unfortunately predictable: “Men,
when faced with provocative and
emotional situations, are often
only able to release their emotions
through violence; whereas women
have developed other and more
constructive ways of expressing and
dealing with emotionally charged
situations.”6
Because of their class orientation
Glen and Campbell do not understand
what many a miner’s wife has learnt
- these conflicts are not between
groups of males, but between the
ruling class and the working class.
Comrades that fail to appreciate
this, who attack the violence of the
unarmed working class against the
armed state, objectively take the side
of the ruling class; they have nothing
to do with working class struggle.
This is why the feminists in the
party have been trying to divert the
orientation of the pit women towards
Greenham-style tactics. Again
they are playing into the hands of
the ruling class by urging passive
resistance as opposed to militancy.
Against this, the pit women have
largely rejected this method of
organisation, even though many of
them believe Greenham to be a good
thing. There is a simple explanation
for this: Women against Pit Closures
know that the state will not have
any qualms about using violence on
them, women or no. Greenham is just
an irritation to the bourgeois state;
the miners’ wives represent much,
much more and it is for this reason
Where, then, is that general
‘woman question’? Where is that
unity of tasks and aspir­a tions,
about which the femi­n ists have
so much to say? A sober glance
at reality shows that such unity
does not and cannot exist ...
The women’s world is divided,
just as is the world of men,
into two camps; the interests
and aspirations of one group
of women bring it close to the
bourgeois class, while the other
group has close connections with
the prole­tariat ... Thus, although
both camps follow the general
slogan of the ‘liberation of
women’, their aims and interests
are different.8
In a society based on class
contradictions there is no place for a
women’s movement indiscriminately
embracing all women. As we have
already demonstrated, bourgeois
women and working women
instinctively represent the interests
of their class, and this gives a bias to
their aims and actions.
The feminists always oppose
themselves to men and demand their
rights from men. For them contem­porary
society is divided into two categories men and women. But for working class
women their class brethren are not their
enemies, because that which unites them
is much stronger than that which divides
them. They are united by their common
lack of rights, their common needs and
their common exploitation.
That women, like men, respond
along class rather than sex lines
has been shown again and again by
history. The Paris Commune was a
good example of where both sides
were not averse to violence for
the victory of their class. Working
women played a valiant role in this
struggle and were courageous to the
last. When the Commune fell, one
woman replied to the accusation of
having killed two soldiers: “May
God punish me for not having killed
more”.9 Over this struggle there was
no common ground between the
bourgeois and working women. After
the fall of the Commune it was the
bourgeois women whose vengeance
was most vicious towards their
working class ‘sisters’: “Elegant and
joyous women, as in a pleasure trip,
betook themselves to the corpses,
and, to enjoy the sight of the valorous
dead, with the end of their sunshades
raised the last coverings.”10
…
Socialism - the key
Hail the women! Hail the
International! The women were
the first to come out on the streets
of Petrograd on their Women’s
Day. The women in Moscow in
many cases deter­mined the need
of the military; they went to
the barracks, and convinced the
soldiers to come over to the side of
the revolution. Hail the women!11
The Russian Revolution was
begun by women. On International
Women’s Day in 1917 women
textile workers went on strike in
Petrograd for bread, against the
war and against the autocracy. The
women appealed to other workers to
support them and this strike proved
to be the start of the revolution. This
one fact is an argument in itself for
anti-feminism. The Bolsheviks had
put much energy into countering the
feminists, into polarising working
class and bourgeois women and
into strengthen­ing the ties between
working class men and women.
The result was the leading role of
women working in the revolution a revolution which was, needless to
say, not supported by the bourgeois
feminists of the time.
After the revolution, for the first
time in history women won full
equality, a fact that sent shock waves
throughout the entire bourgeois world
and that has never been equalled
by any capitalist country to the
present day. However, even then
all the equality legislation that the
Bolsheviks passed did not mean that
Soviet women were actually equal - it
made them formally equal, as distinct
from real social equality. Lenin was
well aware that actual equality took
a long time to build: “the more
thoroughly we clear the ground of
the lumber of the old bourgeois laws
and institutions, the more we realise
that we have only cleared the ground
to build on, but are not yet building.”12
.… For this reason the Bolsheviks
were fully committed to the
socialisation of domestic labour. In a
nutshell this concept means that all the
house­keeping functions of a family,
such as washing, cleaning, cooking
and childcare, are provided by
services of the socialist society. This
does not mean, as the individualism
of the feminists has often led them
to proclaim, that every aspect of
people’s lives is institutionalised,
but rather that families and especially
women are freed from the drudgery
that occupies so much of their time
and consequently enables them to lead
much more fulfilling lives.
For a start this means that such
social services have to be of a very
high standard. Nurseries have to be
locally situated places, where children
look forward to going because they
have more fun than if they were shut
up at home. Parents must be able to
relax, knowing that their children are
being well cared for and happy and for
7
worker 1048 March 5 2015
weekly
that matter mothers and fathers should
be able to share in this community
care for their own and other people’s
children.
Similarly with laundry, cleaning
and cooking. If the services provided
were not high quality, then women
would tend to opt for the drudgery of
doing it themselves. Again feminists
come out with remarks like “24-hour
institution food - ugh!” They would
be correct if canteen level was all
that society aspired to, but we have a
lesson to learn from the bourgeoisie
here. When people talk of communal
eating the immediate parallel that is
drawn is the one of social dinners or
workplace canteens and their plastic
food - but surely the Ritz is also an
institution which caters on a mass
scale? The working class, having
struggled hard for their liberation,
must aspire to the highest common
denominator, not the lowest.
If the necessary resources are
provided, and those preparing the
food trained and in contact with their
consumers and if everyone in the
community can regularly take turns
at work, then the drudgery of cooking
day in day out can be removed. The
canteens of the miners’ strike show in
a small way the social and community
atmosphere that comes through such
organisation.
Of course, organising our lives in
this way does not mean that people
cannot cook for themselves for
pleasure. But it does mean that daily
necessity no longer rules our lives.
The same applies to washing and
cleaning - the bourgeoisie has always
sent its washing to private laundries
and had their houses cleaned for them.
Working class women must have these
facilities, but the difference is that,
like eating and childcare facilities,
these will be provided within their
communities.
(.…)
Women under
capitalism
Studies have shown that for
married women who go out to
work the family and the home are
still the main interests, and are
regarded by themselves ... as the
prime responsibility ... Employers
accept this attitude as socially
right: it should not be changed.
The economic value of the
mother’s work in the home cannot
be calculated, but the social value
is un­questionable.13
Under capitalism, labour-power as
a commodity is quite unique: it is
the only commodity which has the
potential to create more value that it
itself possesses. It is from this living
labour that the capitalist extracts
his surplus value, the source of his
profit. This labour-power and its
ability to produce surplus value for
the capitalist must itself be serviced
by the expenditure of labour-power
to maintain its efficiency. Just as a
machine must be regularly oiled and
cleaned to maintain it in working
order, so too must a worker be fed,
clothed and generally ‘serviced’ to
ensure that he is available and fit for
work the next day.
This domestic work - cooking,
cleaning, laundering, etc - is
privatised, individual toil that
lies outside the sphere of social
production. No surplus value can be
realised by its socialisation; therefore
capitalism is neither interested in
nor capable of removing it from the
sphere of the individual (female):
The maintenance and reproduction
of the working class is, and
this must ever be, a necessary
condition to the reproduction of
capital. But the capitalist may
safely leave its fulfilment to
the labourer’s instincts of selfpreservation and propagation.14
As early as the Communist manifesto
of 1848, Marx and Engels polemicised
against the idea that these ideas meant
that communists were the enemy
of the family per se - the ‘shock/
horror’ tactic used by the bourgeoisie
to discredit Marxism. Familial
relations of one sort or another are
inevitable. What Marxists attack is
the economic function of the family
- its role as an economic unit in
class society, concerned specifically
under capitalism with the gratis
maintenance of the exploitability of
the working class’s labour-power. It
is this economic content of the family
unit and the domestic slavery it entails
that produce the stultification and
oppression that characterise personal
relations in modern bourgeois
families. It is capitalism, not socialism,
that destroys family life.
Fitting in with their domestic
role, women also perform another
important function for capitalism.
Given their marginal position to the
general process of social production,
women are ideal candidates to form
an important part of a fluctuating
reserve army of labour. Such a
reservoir of exploitable labour can be
sucked into the production process in
times of boom or war and expelled
from the ranks of the employed when
accumula­t ion stagnates. Women’s
specific form of oppression dictates
firstly that when employed they
are systematically regulated and
ghettoised into a narrow range of
second-rate ‘peripheral’ jobs and
secondly as ‘natural’ wives and
mothers they are easier to throw out
of work and back into the home.
Around 60% of all women are
in paid employment of one sort or
another and they thus constitute
about 40% of the British workforce.
On average, however, women earn
just 65% of men’s wages and they
make up some 60% of Britain’s four
million low-paid workers. This is
unsurprising when you examine the
patterns of women’s employment. In
1983 some 200,000 more part-time
jobs came onto the market, while
the same period saw over 150,000
women’s full-time jobs disappear.
In the words of the house journal of
the British bourgeoisie, “part-time
women workers in Britain are not just
cheerful, but cheap”.15 The same issue
of this publication went on to estimate
that in the service sector up to 70%
of women part-timers were earning
less than the £34 a week national
insurance threshold.
With the onset of the crisis,
capitalism sets to work squeezing
women out of the workforce - women
are currently losing their jobs at twice
the rate of men. The reactionary
apologists of the bourgeois order are
wheeled out to justify and excuse
the state’s attacks on the rights and
position of working women. There
wasn’t a dry eye in the house at
the 1979 Tory Party conference
when Patrick Jenkin, evidently a
little choked up himself, spoke of
“the family ... [that] has been the
foundation for virtually every free
society known to history. It possesses
strength and resilience, not least in
adversity.”
Working class families under
the Tories of course have come in
for quite a lot of “adversity”. Cuts
in social services and educational
provisions have meant that working
class women have had intolerable
burdens placed on them, as they
attempt to look after the unemployed,
the elderly or the disabled, who have
literally been thrown out onto the
streets by the Tory cuts.
The Tory Family Policy Group was
set up in 1982 to give justification and
direction to these attempts to remove
women from the labour force and
to take on unpaid responsibility for
services which the Tories intend to
axe. While it has organised in its
orbit some of the type of ‘loopies’
of the Tory establishment who look
and sound less believable than their
Spitting image doubles, its central
policy recommend­ations have on the
whole made sound economic sense
for the bourgeoisie. On its ‘ga-ga’
fringe there is Ferdinand ‘Ferdy’
Mount, author of The subversive
family. While Mount’s views do not
necessarily represent the mainstream
of the ruling class’s thinking, his basic
rabidly anti-woman stance is fairly
typical. For example, Mount evidently
does not consider it a fact that women
have been oppressed throughout the
history of class society. Instead,
apparently, it’s simply that men have
had rather a bad press: “... at times in
the Middle Ages we are deafened by
complaints of henpecked husbands
and women asserting their right to
choose husbands or lovers.”
While the Family Policy Group
does not quite want to take us back to
the good old days before the sexually
promiscuous ‘swinging’ Middle Ages
of Mount’s colourful imagination, it
certainly is intent on removing the
fragile and extremely limited gains
that women have made in the postwar period.
The reactionary ideas of John
Bowdley are resuscitated to give
credence to the hysteria about the
‘latchkey kids’ of working mothers:
women are encouraged to rediscover
their natural ‘caring’ role of looking
after those who have become useless
to capital - the old, the sick or the
unemployed; and as a safety net,
should all of this prove too much for
working class women to stand up to,
we must, according to the Family
Policy Group, have “more emphasis
and encouragement to communitybased services like day or short-term
care”. For “community-based” read
‘on the cheap’ and for “short-term”
read ‘inadequate’.
Abortion and contraception rights
are under ideological and financial
attack and every ploy is used to justify
walling women up in the home until
they are needed again by capitalism.
‘What’s best for baby’ now entails
mother staying at home and the sickly
sweet propaganda of the bourgeoisie
is in stark contrast to its denial of
basic rights to working class women
and their children. In the economic
boom working mothers had to make
do with bottle-feeding their infants,
whatever the dangers. Now though,
in recession, the ruling class gushes,
“The best milk yet discovered is
mother’s own.”16
Similarly, 30 years ago Maggie
Thatcher was all for women following
her example and attempting to
combine “marriage and career” and
she pooh-poohed the notion that
it had detrimental effects at home:
“... the idea that the family suffers
is, I believe, quite mistaken.” In the
cold light of 1982, however, she was
altogether more cautious: “Material
goods can never be a substitute for
loving care.”
It is not the way Mark Thatcher
as the ‘latchkey kid’ of the working
mum has turned out that has changed
the Iron Lady’s mind on this matter
(although that would be understand­
able ...). No, it is the fact that today we
are in the depth of economic recession
and, as a political representative of the
bourgeoisie, Thatcher’s job is now to
encourage or force women back into
the home rather than entice them out.
For an even more graphic
exposition of the same basic idea,
let us turn to Sir Keith Joseph, a
man always in the vanguard of Tory
reaction. The Mad Monk was spelling
it out in no uncertain terms way back
in the mid-70s: “Parents are being
divested of their duty to provide for
their family economically, or their
responsibility for education, health
... saving for old age, for housing
... But the only lasting help we can
give the poor is to help themselves.
To do the opposite is to create more
dependence ... throwing an unfair
burden on society.”17
The feminists, with their reformist
and reactionary mumbo-jumbo, are
totally incapable of resisting the
attacks of the state on working women.
Tricia Davis, for example, ponders
on the idiosyncrasies of modern-day
“society”, which has an interesting
parallel with the Keith Joseph quote
above: “It is a society in which
there can be no simple return to full
employment ... In such a society an
alternative economic strategy which
con­structs our working day, year and
life around this concept of caring is
the only one which makes sense ...”18
A component part of this ‘caring’
package is, apparently “... equal
domestic respon­sibility for men and
equal contact with both parents for
children”.
Thus, instead of proposing a
militant campaign for a working class
woman’s right to work regardless of
whether capitalist “society” can afford
to employ them or not, comrade
Davis smugly accepts the prospect
of mass unemployment - one has to
be realistic, after all. Her Alternative
Economic Strategy is consequently
based on ‘caring’ - by which she
appears to understand that men take
equal responsibility for the daily
drudge of domestic work, instead of
removing it from the sphere of the
individual altogether ....
How to fight
.... Contrary to the image of women
as an easy touch for bosses, working
class women have been consistently
involved in militant struggle over the
last couple of decades, their action
ranging over everything from strikes
to fights over hospital and school
closures. However, these women
have largely remained isolated, unable
to communicate their experiences
to other women workers, and thus
organise on a large scale.
The crying need is therefore for a
working class women’s movement that
could link up the best militant working
class women nationally across union,
industry and community boundaries.
Such an organisation would give
enormous strength to working women
in struggle; it would be the scourge
of bosses wanting to use women as a
source of cheap unorganised labour
and of union leaders who fail to back
their women members in struggle.
The failure of the unions to defend
their women workers is in fact a
major reason for the necessity of a
working class women’s movement.
The record of unions on women s
disputes is appalling. The classic
example is that of Grunwicks in 1977,
when mainly Asian women struck for
union recognition. The Apex leaders19
in effect supported the boss and the
police by trying to limit the numbers
of pickets on the gate and by refusing
to organise the blacking of Grunwicks
by other unions. Their betrayal led to
the workers’ defeat.
This is one obvious example, but
in general there can be no doubt that
unions do not work effectively for
their women members. Proof of this
lies in the fact that many unions with
overwhelming female membership are
led by male trade union officials. Union
meetings are usually inaccessible to
women, being held after work in pubs
and without crèches, etc. One of the
first campaigns for a working class
women’s movement must be for union
meetings to be held in the bosses time
....
A sign of things to
come
.... The pit women are obviously a
beacon for the future of a working
class women’s movement. The
miners’ strike has seen the political
organisation of working class
women on an unprecedented scale
in British history. These women
workers and housewives have united
in the common struggle to save their
communities and in doing so they
have shocked both the bosses, who
expected them to drive their menfolk
back to work, and even their class
brothers, who didn’t expect their
support to take on such a militant and
political face.
But one strike does not a movement
make and therefore communists need
to be working hard to consolidate these
positive developments and to give a
lead to the spontaneous militancy these
women have thrown up. The Euros
in the party have attempted to give a
lead, in that they have tried to impose
the ‘go floppy’ tactics and ideology of
Greenham on the miners’ wives and to
set them against the violence used by the
miners to fight back. It is up to genuine
communists to counter this course,
which can only lead to failure for the
pit women and cause divisions within
the working class. We need to adopt
the slogan, ‘Agitation and propaganda
through action’: in other words, we must
lead by example and show working class
women through experience that every
action directed against the exploitation
of capital, every step towards reforging
a Communist Party, is a blow struck
against women’s oppression.
The miners’ wives learnt to organise
themselves and the lack of communist
leadership has made the lessons that
more painful. Kay Sutcliffe of Kent
Women Against Pit Closures expressed
this in an interview in February’s edition
of The Leninist: “I feel sorry that we
didn’t contact the wives of the British
Leyland workers when they had their
industrial dispute, and also the dockers.
I think we missed our chance there; we
should have gone straight in.”
It is this sort of perspective that
needs to be initiated. The building of
a working class women’s movement
cannot be put off to some distant date. It
is not only necessary now, but we would
be failing our class if we did not try
to nurture the seed that the pit women
have planted. By making links with
other women in struggle and the wives
of male workers in struggle, and by
organising national coordination of the
existing Women Against Pit Closures
groups towards this aim, the beginnings
of such a movement can be made.
It is in this way that working class
women will start to shatter one by one
the chains that are forged for them
under capitalism. The awakening of
the women will be the harbinger of the
society of the future, communism, which
will see not simply the full equality of
women, but the emancipation of all
humanity l
Notes
1 First verse of a song written for pit women,
.
quoted in the Morning Star January 8 1985.
2. Comrade Tricia Davis Focus January 17 1985.
3. A Kollontai The social basis of the woman question.
4. Leo Abse, Labour Party MP Hansard December
17 1982. The Greenham Common Women’s Peace
Camp was a long-running protest, beginning in
1981, against nuclear weapons outside the Greenham Common RAF base
5. The reference is to the dispute between the print
union, the National Graphical Association, and
the noxious reactionary, Eddie Shah, who utilised
Thatcher’s anti-trade union laws and selective
sacking of union activists in a dispute in 1983.
The NGA responded with mass picketing of the
outlets concerned - the Warrington Messenger
- and on November 30, 4,000 trade unionists
confronted riot-trained police from five surrounding areas. The NGA speaker van was attacked and
overturned by police, while squads in full riot gear
repeatedly charged the pickets.
6. Focus February 7 1985.
7. Mari Collins, leading Kent activist, interviewed
in The Leninist February 1985.
8. A Kollontai The social basis of the woman question.
9. S Edwards The Paris Commune 1871 p330.
10. P Lissagray History of the Paris Commune p419.
11. Pravda editorial after the February revolution.
12. VI Lenin The emancipation of women.
13. CBI Employing women: the employer’s view
September 1967.
14. K Marx Capital Vol 1, p537.
15. The Economist September 29 1984.
16. The Guardian February 11 1976.
17. The Times October 21 1974.
18. Marxism Today October 1983.
19. The Association of Professional, Executive,
Clerical and Computer Staff (Apex) was originally
founded in 1890 as the Clerks’ Union. It merged
with the GMB in 1989.
8
March 5 2015 1048 worker
weekly
alienation
Jihadists and spooks
Revelations about ‘Jihadi John’ have led to calls for more curbs on democracy and free speech, writes
Eddie Ford
W
e have been deluged
with endless details and
speculation - most of it
extremely idle - about the personality
and motives of the 26-year-old
Kuwaiti-born Londoner, Mohammed
Emwazi (aka ‘Jihadi John’). Seemingly
responsible for several video-taped
beheadings, his apparent ambition
when 10 was to be a professional
footballer and his list of favourite
things at that time was chips, the pop
group, S Club 7, The Simpsons and
the best-selling Goosebumps book,
How to kill a monster. A favourite
media image is of Emwazi, or ‘Mo’
as he liked to be called then, wearing
a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap.
He spent his early years in the “dirtpoor” district of Taima1 in Kuwait City,
his father being a Bedoon who had
fled Saddam Hussein’s regime - and
like all Bedoons, was regarded by the
authorities as an illegal immigrant.2 By
various accounts, Emwazi - who arrived
in Britain aged six and grew up in west
London - was a polite, mild-mannered
young man, and went to school at the
Quintin Kynaston Academy. Two of
his school contemporaries, as it turns
out, later became jihadist fighters for
Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Shabaab - both
subsequently killed in action.
Rather embarrassingly, or perhaps
fittingly, Quintin Kynaston was a
favourite with Tony Blair when
he was prime minister - he used it
to launch his ‘extended schools’
scheme. Naturally, a statement from
the school’s current leadership said
they were “shocked and sickened” by
the unmasking of Emwazi. One of his
former teachers told the BBC that he
was a “lovely, lovely boy” and had
been considered a “success story”
because he went to the university of
his choice (ie, Westminster). He had,
however, received anger management
therapy after getting involved in
fights. Apparently, he would get very
“worked up” and it would take him a
“long time to calm himself down”, so
the school helped him to “control his
emotions”.
Anyway, he graduated in computer
studies and then drifted between
jobs as a computer programmer and
made efforts to move abroad after
gaining a foreign-language teaching
qualification - before eventually
getting a job with an IT firm in Kuwait.
Just like his school days, he was highly
regarded - the “best employee we ever
had”, who was “calm and decent”,
yet withdrawn and not particularly
sociable. A bit of an enigma, always
slightly troubled. In April 2010 he
requested emergency family leave to
return to the UK. Emwazi’s Kuwaiti
employers never saw him again.
Threatened
What really happened, however, was
that Emwazi was detained by counterterrorism officials in Britain - who
fingerprinted him and stopped him
from returning to Kuwait. Emwazi had
been on MI5’s radar since 2009, when
he was refused entry to Tanzania. He
insisted that he wanted to go on safari,
but MI5 claimed he was using it as an
entry point into Somalia as part of a
plan to join al-Shabaab.
From there he was put on a
plane to the Netherlands, where he
was exhaustively questioned by the
intelligence service, later saying in
a series of emails that the British
officers knew “everything about me”:
ie, “where I lived, what I did, and the
people I hanged around with”. He
felt like a “person imprisoned and
Mohammed Emwazi, aka Jihadi John
controlled” by the security service,
which prevented him from living the
new life he wanted in Kuwait. Indeed
he said he already felt like a “dead
man walking”. He also claims that he
was asked to become an informant,
but refused - an MI5 officer allegedly
said that in that case “life would be
harder” for him.
In fact, an audio tape from this
period has emerged with him openly
contemplating suicide just to get away
from MI5 “harassment” . The recording
was made by the advocacy group,
Cage (formerly Cageprisoners, a
London-based organisation founded by
Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo
Bay detainee), whose stated aim is to
“highlight and campaign against state
policies developed as part of the war
on terror”.3 In the tape, Emwazi says
MI5 “threatened” him and tried to “put
words into my mouth”. For example,
an officer told him: “We’re going to
keep a close eye on you, Mohammed.
We already have been”. Emwazi said
the agent also asked him what he
thought of 9/11, the war in Afghanistan
and the July 7 2005 attacks in London.
Emwazi replied “innocent people” had
been killed in the attacks and it was
“extremism”, and that what happened
on 9/11 was “wrong”.
Four months after being refused reentry to Kuwait, Emwazi sent an email
to Asim Qureshi, Cage’s research
director, expressing sympathy for Aafia
Siddiqui - a Pakistani-born al-Qa’eda
operative who had been sentenced in
the US to 86 years in prison for assault
and attempted murder.4 Qureshi says
he last heard from Emwazi when
he sought advice in January 2012,
describing him as “extremely kind,
gentle and soft-spoken, the most
humble young person I knew”. Close
friends of Emwazi interviewed by
The Washington Post report that by
this stage he was “desperate to leave
the country” - apparently in 2012 he
tried unsuccessfully to travel to Saudi
Arabia to teach English. Some time
that year, Emwazi finally ended up
in Syria - and in the middle of the
following year, according to some
press stories, MI5 informed his family
as to his current known location.
Creating much controversy, Cage
held a press conference on February
26 chaired by none other than John
Rees, former big-wig of the Socialist
Workers Party and now Counterfire. At
the event, Qureshi stated that Emwazi’s
repeated detention and interrogation
by the security services made him
“susceptible” to “radicalisation”,
and also justified Cage’s long-held
view that jihadi violence is “driven”
by the actions of the west. Amnesty
International though was less than
impressed by the press conference
and is presently “reviewing whether
any future association with the
group would now be appropriate”.5
Furthermore, the Charity Commission
confirmed on March 2 that it was
“investigating” two major funders of
Cage, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable
Trust (JRCT) and the Anita Roddick
Foundation. On the other hand, the
commission complained that the recent
public statements by Cage raise “clear
questions” as to how the organisation
could or should “comply with their
legal duties as charity trustees”. In
other words, don’t express sympathy
for people who may become terrorists.
The Emwazi story obviously has
strong echoes of Michael Adebolajo,
the murderer of Lee Rigby in 2013,
who later turned out to be well
known to the security agencies - they
attempted to recruit him too, if we
are to believe what we read in the
newspapers. Sir Menzies Campbell, an
outgoing member of the intelligence
and security committee, said he
expected MPs to request - or demand
- a report from the security services
after the general election about their
contacts with Emwazi: there must
be answers. Very unhappy, David
Davis, the former Tory shadow home
secretary, bemoaned that Emwazi
had been “allowed to escape” and
become Islamic State’s “western
poster boy”. This showed MI5 tactics
were “ineffective” - fitting into a
“worrying pattern” of complacency
and bureaucratic inertia, he said.
Instead of relying on “outdated tactics”
like trying to recruit Islamists, Davis
wrote in The Guardian, they need to be
convicted and imprisoned - otherwise
that leaves “known terrorists” free to
“carry out evil deeds and to recruit
more conspirators” (February 27).
Naturally, Nigel Farage could
not resist putting his oar in too. He
told the BBC’s Breakfast show that
getting involved in “foreign wars
have probably made things worse
rather than better”. Instead, the money
wasted on these misguided adventures
would be better spent on “boosting”
the security services - after all, there
is “an enemy within this country”, a
“fifth column”, and “we have got to
deal with it”. More spooks, please end the pussyfooting around.
Barbarism
In this way, the press, politicians, the
securitocracy - and Nigel Farage - are
banging the drum for increased curbs
on democracy and free speech, greater
state ‘supervision’ of the internet,
more government control of schools
and colleges, more house detentions,
more imprisonment, etc. Showing the
zeitgeist, Quintin Kynaston school
issued a statement saying it had been
“extremely proactive” in working with
the government’s Prevent strategy
and will “continue to be so for the
foreseeable future”. In other words,
teachers must spy on their students
more effectively - or else.
Prevent, of course, made it a legal
requirement for teachers, lecturers,
landlords and benefits staff to report
behaviour that could be deemed
conducive or helpful to “radicalisation”
and “extremism” - and was one of the
four Ps that made up the government’s
post-9/11 counter-terrorism strategy
known as Contest: prepare for attacks,
protect the public, pursue the attackers
and prevent their radicalisation in the
first place. Ministers threw cash at
Prevent, particularly in the wake of
the 2005 London suicide bombings
- in the six years after those attacks
almost £80 million was spent on 1,000
schemes across 94 local authorities.
Their effect was insidious, causing
a general climate of political and
intellectual authoritarianism - all in the
name of combating ‘hate speech’. Not
that it prevented Kelvin MacKenzie
from ranting in The Sun that the
“old saying that not all Muslims
are terrorists, but all terrorists are
Muslims, has never been truer”. He
scared his readers with the findings
of a BBC poll, which he said showed
that 27% of all British Muslims (ie,
800,000) have “sympathy” with the
Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris - a
statistic that will “rightly put the fear
of God up law-abiding and peaceful
folk” (February 25).6 Muslims are our
enemy: drive them out?
Communists, however, do not
regard the likes of Emwazi as just
irrational - totally crazy people from
a different world. Look at what
imperialism is doing every day in
the Middle East, with its actions and
polices, leading to mass suffering,
death and murder. Look at the liars,
Jack Straw and Tony Blair, with their
dodgy dossiers and phantom WMDs,
pushing for a war in Iraq that had totally
predictable results - social chaos,
dismemberment and barbarism. Judged
from this perspective, the jihadist
response to imperialist oppression is
understandable. The crucial point for
us, however, is that organisations like
IS are part of this barbarism, never
part of the solution - which requires
consistent and principled working
class anti-imperialism.
Nevertheless, it goes without saying
that we in the CPGB are resolutely
opposed to calls for more state control
and extra armies of spooks. We want
unhindered freedom to debate and
argue: backward ideas should be
openly challenged and defeated.
Meaning, in short, that the answer
lies with the left. Alas, the left at the
moment is also part of the problem: it
has no viable strategy. With regards
to Greece, most of the left robotically
urged Syriza to ‘take the power’ - and
then do what? Even worse, Left Unity
made Syriza its official sister party tying itself to the mast of managing
the capitalist crisis. When it comes to
imperialist war, the reaction from the
left has - if anything - being even more
hopeless. Basically the strategy of the
left has been to ‘march, march, march
and march again’.
Yet Stop the War Coalition marched
for over a decade and got nowhere.
Inevitably, the marches got smaller and
less effective, precisely because people
see that marching on its own could not
stop war. Demonstrations and rallies
are inherently limited. What the left
should be doing is telling the truth,
whether it be about Iraq, Greece, Syria,
or anything else. More importantly
still, we need a governmental project
- that should be prioritised above
everything. Otherwise all our efforts
will ultimately come to nothing, no
matter how laudable or sincere.
Trotsky memorably used the
analogy of steam and the engine:
anger and energy eventually fizzles
out without a well organised party to
harness it. And out of the dissipation
emerge, grimly, forces such as alQa’eda and IS l
[email protected]
Notes
1. www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/inside-jihadijohns-birthplace-kuwait-5251430.
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Bedoon_%28ethnicity%29.
3. www.cageuk.org.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aafia_Siddiqui.
5. The Guardian March 2.
6. What the BBC poll actually showed, amongst
many things, was that 27% of the 1,000 Muslims
polled by ComRes said they had “some” sympathy for the “motives” behind the Paris attacks and
almost 80% said they found it “deeply offensive”
when images depicting the prophet Mohammed
were published. On the other hand, 95% felt a
“loyalty” to Britain, and 93% believed that Muslims should always “obey” British laws: www.
bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31293196.
9
worker 1048 March 5 2015
weekly
Italy
Lega Nord and neo-fascism
Lega Nord secretary Matteo Salvini: far right
T
he demonstration called by the
Lega Nord in Rome on February
28 represented a milestone in the
Lega’s genetic mutation. It is now
closer to a neo-fascist organisation that
is attempting to organise throughout
the national territory - rather than a
regionalist party demanding increased
devolution or outright independence for
the mythical ‘Padania’, as it has labelled
northern Italy for the last 25 years.
Whilst the Lega has always been a
racist organisation hostile to black and
Arab immigrants as well as to Roma,
regardless of how long they have been
living in Italy, under the leadership
of its founder, Umberto Bossi, it
maintained some degree of distance
from the Movimento Sociale Italiano
(MSI), Alleanza Nazionale (AN) and
other neo-fascist (or allegedly ‘postfascist’) groupings. To some extent this
apparent ‘anti-fascism’ and occasional
identification with the northern
resistance of 1943-45 was connected
to its hostility to Rome and the south.
With some justice the Lega regarded
neo-fascism as essentially a Roman
and southern phenomenon, as, with
the exception of Trieste on Italy’s north
eastern border with Slovenia, all MSI/
AN strongholds were in these regions.
After Bossi’s long political career
ended in disgrace due to corruption
scandals, he was eventually succeeded
by the much younger Matteo Salvini,
resulting in the Lega setting out on
a new course. This new orientation
involves downplaying the historical
demands for a separate Padania in
favour of a combination of ferocious
anti-immigrant rhetoric and hostility to
the European Union. Whilst the hatred
of immigrants has with varying degrees
of intensity been a constant feature
of the Lega’s appeal, Its emphasis
on the evils of the EU is a new one
- the Lega, rather like the Scottish
National Party, had originally sought
independence within the EU, arguing
that an independent Padania would
be economically successful and much
more able to compete with northern
European states if it was freed from
the dead weight of the backward and
parasitic south, with its high taxation
and welfare spending.
The new course has led it to ally
at the European level with Marine
Le Pen’s Front National, as well as
to take up a more favourable attitude
towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia,
which Salvini has visited and from
which it is widely believed the Lega
receives a fair amount of its funding. It
has also led to a much more conflictual
relationship with the Lega’s ally for
the last 15 years, Silvio Berlusconi’s
Forza Italia.
Whilst Berlusconi is far from
enamoured with the European Central
Bank and the European Commission
and believes that his replacement
as prime minister by Mario Monti
in November 2011 was largely
orchestrated from outside Italy (a
theory which has a fair degree of
plausibility), he is anxious to keep
Euroscepticism within certain limits
and maintain some links with the
mainstream European centre-right,
represented in the European parliament
by the European People’s Party.
Moreover, Berlusconi is anxious to
preserve a Forza Italia-led centreright administration in Campania, the
region of which Naples is the centre.
He thinks this would be impossible
without an alliance with Angelino
Alfano’s Nuovo Centro Destra (NCD
- New Centre Right). He has demanded
that the Lega accept an alliance with
not only Forza Italia, but the NCD as
well for the regional elections that will
take place on May 10.
The struggle between a resurgent
Lega and a declining Forza Italia,
which are now almost level-pegging
in the opinion polls, in the 13%-15%
range, is further complicated by internal
splits in both of these organisations.
Berlusconi’s much weaker hold over
his own party is demonstrated by his
inability to deal with the stubborn
dissidence of Raffaele Fitto, a former
president of the Puglia region, who
gained a very high preference vote
in the 2014 European elections. Fitto
now commands a sizeable group of
around 40 Forza Italia parliamentarians,
mainly from Puglia, but including
a fair number from other southern
regions. He believed that the excessive
identification of Forza Italia with a PDled government played straight into the
hands of the Lega and allowed it to eat
into Forza Italia’s traditional electorate.
Berlusconi’s decision to return
to a much more oppositional stance
- symbolised by the walkout of the
Forza Italia group in the Chamber of
Deputies during a recent debate on
the Italicum, prime minister Matteo
Renzi’s new electoral reform - was
in large part a response to Fitto’s
pressure, but the fact that the elderly
delinquent has belatedly adopted the
younger man’s political line has not led
to any reconciliation between the two.
But the Lega, too, is plagued by
internal divisions - especially in the
Veneto region, where elections will
take place this May. The feud between
the Veneto’s regional president, Luca
Zaia, and the mayor of Verona and
secretary of the Liga Veneta, Flavio
Tosi, has escalated in the last few
weeks. It is now quite probable that
Tosi will break with the Lega in the
next few days, since he is refusing to
dissolve an association he set up some
time ago, which Salvini and Zaia are
now regarding as a party within the
party. Tosi is due to meet NCD leader
Angelino Alfano - allegedly about
matters connected with urban security,
but in reality to discuss the possibility
of an alliance between Tosi’s followers
and the NCD for the regional elections.
Conversely, if this break occurs, it
seems very likely that the official Lega
Nord/Liga Veneta list will ally with
Forza Italia for the regional elections,
creating a head-to-head contest
between Zaia and Tosi. Although this
is a region in which the centre-left has
traditionally been relatively weak, it is
by no means certain that the split on
the right will not assist Renzi’s Partito
Democratico in gaining control of yet
another region, given the increase in
its vote in the north-east in the 2014
European election.
There are rumours that in the event
of a poor Forza Italia performance in
May, Berlusconi will scrap this party
and create a new one with the name
of ‘Forza Silvio’, but such antics
would probably lead to a rapid split
with Fitto’s followers, who envisage
a post-Berlusconi centre-right. The
latest opinion poll has placed the Lega
clearly ahead of Forza Italia by 14.6%
to 13%.
To return to the Rome demonstration,
it should be noted that not only was it
a demonstration in the capital city that
sought to involve Romans (rather than
a gathering of northerners to express
anti-Roman sentiment of the sort that
the Lega has organised in earlier years),
but it clearly demonstrated an open
willingness to ally with neo-fascists.
The participation of Fratelli d’Italia,
a parliamentary party in the MSI/AN
tradition, had been announced for
some time. What was more remarked
upon was a substantial contingent of
the hard-line street-fighting fascists
of the notorious Casa Pound, whose
banners were very much in evidence.
These included some that openly
praised Mussolini - and who made
considerable use of the celtic cross,
the emblem of the hard-core fascists
nostalgics, particularly in Rome.
What was slightly reassuring, given
the considerable size - some tens of
thousands - of the demonstration, was
the size of the anti-fascist counterdemonstration, which the police
kept away from the Salvini rally. La
Repubblica estimated the anti-fascist
crowd at an impressive 20,000. It
included autonomists as well as
contingents from Rifondazione, Sinistra
Ecologia e Libertà and others, but it
clearly had a hard-left rather than centreleft character, with slogans that indicated
opposition to Renzi as well as to Salvini
and indeed to austerity in general.
Whether Greek events will spark a
more lasting revival of the Italian left
is still an open question, but it is clear
that the continuing economic crisis and
the relative decline of Berlusconi is
providing an opening to what some
have baptised fascio-leghismo (fascist
link-up) on the extreme racist right l
Toby Abse
Fighting fund
Make it a first
F
ollowing a remarkable three
days, we ended February just
short of our £1,750 fighting fund
target by the narrowest of margins.
Writing from the US, comrade
AP added no less than £100 to his
resubscription and commented:
“Still the best paper on the left.” For
her part, comrade PB sent us two
cheques, including a total donation
of £90, while three standing order
contributions (thank you, JT, DS
and SS) gave us a further £120, and
a PayPal gift from NW added £40.
All that came to £350 and took our
total for the month to £1,705! A
fantastic last 10 days had left us
just £45 short.
And our March fund has got
off to a good start, with the first
post of the month containing a
£70 cheque from JH, who writes:
“I only wish I could give more.
This week’s cover art is worth that
alone!” There were also PayPal
donations from JS (£40 added to
his subscription), JS (£20) and MD
(£10), while standing orders from
no fewer than 20 comrades (it’s the
start of the month, after all!) added
up to £379. So, after just four days,
our March fund stands at £519.
Amongst those 20, by the way,
are four comrades who have either
taken out a new standing order or
increased their existing one (by
amounts ranging from £1 to £40!).
Thanks go to MS, DC, ST and TB.
But we now need to step up our SO
campaign, so we get the full amount
we need every month. Can’t we
make March a first in that regard?
And all you web readers can
join in too - there were 3,807 of
you last week. That PayPal button
is so easy to use! l
Robbie Rix
Fill in a standing order form
(back page), donate via our
website, or send cheques,
payable to Weekly Worker
10
March 5 2015 1048 worker
weekly
Israel
Netanyahu’s double gamble
Calling the general election is partially the result of the dissonance between Washington and Jerusalem,
writes Moshé Machover
O
n December 2 2014 Israel’s
prime minister, Binyamin
(Bibi) Netanyahu, sacked two
of his senior cabinet ministers and
coalition partners - finance minister
Yair Lapid and justice minister Tzipi
Livni - thereby forcing the dissolution
of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset,
long before the end of its term. 1
Elections for a new Knesset have been
set for March 17.
The two sacked ministers belong (in
Israeli terms) to centrist parties, which
are therefore on the left of Netanyahu
and his other coalition partners, all of
whom belong to the extreme right and
the ultra-extreme right.
Foreign
There were several political differences
that led to the crisis, but the most important cause was Netanyahu’s flagrant
confrontational stance towards Barack
Obama’s US administration and his
open alliance with the US Republican
right against the White House. This
is a marked departure from the longstanding norm in Israel-US relations,
whereby Israel avoided openly taking
sides in the party politics of its chief
protector and sponsor, and relied on US
bipartisan support.
Thus Netanyahu has abandoned
Israel’s traditional strategy of
accommodating American presidential
pretence of managing an IsraeliPalestinian ‘peace process’ aimed at
a ‘two-state solution’. Whereas more
cautious Israeli leaders kept up the
charade and made sure that the sham
process would go on and on but lead
nowhere, Netanyahu brazenly burst
the hot-air balloon in the face of the
exasperated secretary of state, John
Kerry.2
An even more explosive issue is
Iran. While the Obama administration
is keen to cut some kind of deal with the
Islamic Republic, Netanyahu is singlemindedly engaged in warmongering.
His real motivation is not fear of an
Iranian nuke that would obliterate
Israel: this tall tale is spread by
dishonest spin-doctors and
believed by fools.3 In fact, the
Mossad (Israel’s counterpart
of MI6 and the CIA) does not
believe this, as has been made
clear by recent helpful leaks.4
What lies behind
Netanyahu’s war-lust is
worry that a US-Iran deal
may undermine Israel’s total
regional hegemony under
America’s franchise. He
may also hope that a regional
conflagration can provide an
opportunity for massive ethnic
cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from
territories occupied by
Israel. I
explored these motives in some detail in
a Weekly Worker article three years ago.5
What occasioned the recent leaks
was Netanyahu’s impending impudent
appearance before the US congress
to preach his gospel of war. The
leakers in Tel-Aviv or Washington
(or both) evidently wished to
sabotage Netanyahu’s sermon. They
are horrified by its anticipated nasty,
dangerous and dishonest message, as
well as by the impertinent protocolbreaching way in which the visit had
been arranged behind Obama’s back by
the Republican speaker of the House,
John Boehner, and Netanyahu’s man,
Israel’s American-born ambassador to
Washington, Ron Dromer.6
In abandoning Israel’s traditional
bipartisan relationship with both
US Democrats and Republicans,
and openly antagonising Obama,
his administration and at least some
of his party, Netanyahu is taking a
big gamble. Among the risks is the
possible alienation of many American
Jews. He may please Sheldon
Adelson, who is (appropriately) a
gambling business magnate and a
major donor to the Republican Party,
as well as financing a freebie Israeli
daily newspaper that functions as
Netanyahu’s propaganda sheet. But
Adelson’s rightwing Republican
politics is by no means shared by most
American Jews, who overwhelmingly
vote for the Democrats. Indeed, it has
been pointed out that many more Jews
voted for Obama (in America) than for
Netanyahu (in Israel).
Dennis Ross is an ardent Zionist and
veteran US diplomat, having served as
dishonest broker in the endless ‘peace
process’ under two Republican and two
Democrat presidents. Interviewed by
Ha’aretz editor-in-chief Aluf Benn, he
urged Bibi to draw back: “Netanyahu
should admit [his] decision to address
Congress was a mistake.” Meir Dagan,
f o r m e r Mossad chief,
Binyamin Netanyahu: warmongering in Washington
was even more scathing: “The person
causing the most strategic harm to
Israel on the Iranian issue is the prime
minister.”7
Meantime an unprecedented war of
words has erupted between the Obama
administration and Netanyahu. On
February 18 Reuters reported: “US
accuses Israel of inaccurate leaks
on Iran nuclear talks.” White House
spokesman Josh Earnest is quoted as
saying, “We see that there is a continued
practice of cherry-picking specific
pieces of information and using them
out of context to distort the negotiating
position of the United States.”8 And
secretary of state John Kerry, in a barely
veiled swipe at Netanyahu, observed
that “critics of an emerging nuclear deal
with Iran did not know what they were
talking about”.9
For their part, Netanyahu’s election
spin-doctors came up with an ad and
video hostile to the White House: “If
Israel listened to the United States, it
wouldn’t exist”.10
Netanyahu’s major foreignpolicy bet seems to be based on the
assumption that Obama is a dead man
walking and the ascendency of the
Republican right is irreversible. How
this wager will work out for Netanyahu
(and for Israel) remains to be seen. Its
consequences will take time to unfold.
Domestic
In breaking up his ruling coalition,
Netanyahu also made a short-term
electoral calculation. His Likud party
entered the present Knesset in February
2013 in a united bloc with Yisrael
Beitenu (‘Israel Our Home’) led by the
thuggish Avigdor Liebermann. The bloc
won 31 seats, and was by far the largest
party in the 120-seat Knesset. The second largest party was Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid (‘There is a Future’), with
19 seats. But in July 2014 the bloc split.
Lieberman’s party remained in the coalition, but
now controlled 11 of the 31 seats,
leaving Netanyahu’s Likud with 20.
Subsequent resignations changed the
balance further, giving Lieberman’s
party 13 seats and Netanyahu’s only 18.
The latter assumed, based on December
opinion trends, that a new election
would give the Likud considerably more
than 18 seats.
So far, he seems to have been right,
in that all recent opinion polls indicate
that the Likud will get at least 22 seats.
But this may not be enough. At the
time of writing, the Likud is running
virtually neck and neck with the Zionist
Union, a bloc of the centrist Hatnuah
(‘The Movement’) led by Tzipi Livni
and the centre-leftish Labour led by
Yitzhak Herzog. Some polls give the
latter bloc a slight edge. Moreover,
last-minutes shifts are always
possible, although recent revelations
of Netanyahu’s misappropriation of
public funds to pay for his lavish
private lifestyle have so far done him
little damage in the polls.11
But, even assuming that the Likud
gets more votes than the Zionist Union,
Bibi may have difficulty in finding
partners for a new coalition. He is
unlikely to enlist those whom he has
just sacked from the old coalition, or
any other party that is opposed to his
new line in foreign policy. This rules
out the Zionist Union and Yesh Atid
(predicted to win about 12 seats, seven
down from its present 19). It also rules
out Meretz, the vestigial fag-end of the
Zionist left (predicted five seats, down
from six).
Another complication, which
may prevent Netanyahu heading a
government even if the Likud wins a
plurality of seats, is the formation of a
joint electoral list comprising Hadash (a
front of Rakah, the ‘official communist’
party), two secular Arab nationalist
parties and an Islamic party. This
grouping, which is sometimes referred
to as the ‘Joint Arab List’ - although
one of its highly placed candidates is
Dov Khenin, a Hebrew member of
the Rakah-Hadash leadership - may
increase the representation of antiZionists in the Knesset.
The background to the formation of
the joint list is ironic. Israel operates a
system of proportional representation,
whereby each list of candidates
(presented by a party or a bloc of
parties) gets a number of seats very
nearly proportional to the number of
votes cast for it. However, in order
to get any seat at all, a list has to get
votes above a certain threshold. Until
1992 the threshold was very low: 1%
of the total. It was subsequently raised
to 1.5% and then, in 2004, to 2%. But
in March 2014 it was raised again to an
all-time high of 3.25%. This was clearly
aimed at Hadash and the Arab parties: at
present Hadash and a bloc of two Arab
parties have four seats each, and a third
Arab party, Balad, has three. Among
the three Balad MKs is Haneen Zoabi,
a feisty, courageous parliamentarian,
whom the Zionist politicians love to
hate. In fact, they tried unsuccessfully
to prevent her personally from running
for the new Knesset.12
At any rate, the new 3.25%
threshold, which was designed to
reduce the number of anti-Zionist
and especially Arab MKs, is almost
certain to have the opposite effect,
by virtually forcing the four parties
to form their joint list, as a move of
self-preservation. This is indeed a
tactical exercise: the four parties will
keep their separate organisations and
remain politically independent. Polls
indicate that the joint list will get at
least 12 seats, one more than the four
components have at present. It is quite
possible that the formation of the joint
list will induce a greater participation
of Arab voters than in the past. In
the last election the participation of
Arab voters was only 56%, which is
very low by Israeli standards. It is
now expected that over 62% of the
eligible Arab voters will participate in
the forthcoming elections. Depending
on the final results, and on the number
of seats gained by other parties, the
joint list may be in a position to keep
Netanyahu out of office.
It is also possible that the joint list
will attract some additional Hebrew
protest votes. A noteworthy recent
recruit to Hadash is Avraham Burg, a
religious Jew who is a former speaker
of the Knesset and chairman of the
Jewish Agency and the World Zionist
Organisation. Over the years he has
undergone radicalisation, and in 2003
he published an article declaring that
Zionism must be laid to rest.13
Although the components of the joint
list remain separate parties, they had to
publish a joint election manifesto. It is
a brief document consisting of seven
points. It comes out in favour of the
‘two-state solution’ and a just resolution
of the problem of the Palestinian
refugees, ensuring their right of return.
For Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens
it demands equal individual rights as
well as collective rights and autonomy
as a national minority, part of the Arab
nation. In its democratic and socioeconomic demands the manifesto is
broadly left-reformist social-democratic
(and thus considerably to the left of the
British Labour Party).
However, Palestinian Arab
feminists have pointed out that
the platform’s demands for equal
rights for women, etc is somehow
inconsistent with the fact that two of
the joint list candidates, both likely to
be elected, are openly polygamous.
One of them belongs to the Islamic
party; the other, believe it or not, is
standing for the ‘official communist’
party, Rakah-Hadash14 l
Notes
1. The Knesset is elected for a term of four years.
The last elections were held on January 22 2013.
2. See my article, ‘Quest for legitimacy’ (Weekly
Worker September 18 2014).
3. In one of these categories we must include
comrade Sean Matgamna, misleader of the
Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. See his articles,
‘What if Israel bombs Iran?’ July 28 2008 (www.
workersliberty.org/story/2008/07/28/what-ifisrael-bombs-iran-discussion-article); ‘Israel,
Iran and socialism’, September 11 2008 (www.
workersliberty.org/story/2008/09/10/israel-iranand-socialism-sean-matgamna-replies-moshe-machover); and my respective replies: ‘Abominable
warmongering on the left’ (Weekly Worker August
28 2008); ‘Propaganda and sordid reality’ (Weekly
Worker September 18 2008).
4. See ‘Leaked cables show Netanyahu’s Iran
bomb claim contradicted by Mossad’ The Guard‑
ian February 23 2015.
5. ‘Netanyahu’s war wish’ Weekly Worker February 9 2012.
6. See ‘White House says Benjamin Netanyahu’s
surprise trip to US is a breach of protocol’ The
Daily Telegraph February 25 2015.
7. Ross reported by Ha’aretz February 17 2015.
The Ross interview is on YouTube and is worth
watching: http://youtu.be/PEuxDkpo5uw. ‘Former
Mossad head urges Israeli voters to oust Binyamin
Netanyahu’ The Guardian February 27 2015.
8. www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/18/us-usairan-whitehouse-idUSKBN0LM1ZH20150218.
9. Daily Mail February 24 2015.
10. For details see www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/netanyahus-new-campaign-ad-if-israellistened-to-the-united#.cnDPoOjNeQ.
11. ‘Binyamin Netanyahu faces damning expenses
accusations ahead of elections’ The Guardian
February 17 2015.
12. See report on her case: http://us4.campaignarchive2.com/?u=4c0bb759968fd1dcd47869809&
id=e0a37b9fda&e=0455bda52e.
13. ‘The end of Zionism’ The Guardian September 15 2003.
14. I Abu-Sharb and R Shalabnah-Bahuti, ‘Beware, polygamous candidates’ (Hebrew) Ha’aretz
February 9 2015.
11
worker 1048 March 5 2015
weekly
Polarisation continues to grow
Tel Aviv: vandalised election poster of Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni
Tony Greenstein thinks that the chances of a Labour-led coalition are slim
T
he Israeli Labour Party,
running with Tsipi
Livni’s Hatnuah, has
high hopes of forming the
next government. It is likely
to be disappointed.
Netanyahu dissolved the
Knesset two years early
as a result of the refusal
of Livni and Yair Lapid
of Yesh Atid to agree to
proposals to entrench, as a
basic (constitutional) law,
the definition of Israel as a
Jewish state. Arabic would
have been removed as the
second official language in
Israel and there would have
been a failure to even pay
lip-service to the equality
of all Israeli citizens,
regardless of national/
religious affiliation, in law.
There have, of
course, never been any
disagreements within the
Zionist parties about Israel
being a Jewish state. What
the disagreement focused on
is the wisdom of putting this
into law and thus making it
clear that Israeli Palestinians
are the equivalent of
Gastarbeiter (guest
workers), tolerated strangers
at best, within this state.
The context for this has
been a raft of legislation
specifically targeting
Israel’s Palestinian minority.
Teachers are banned from
dealing with the Nakba, the
expulsion of Palestinians
in 1947-48. Discrimination
against Palestinians in
terms of the right to lease
‘national land’ has been
reinstated after a decision of
the high court in 2000.
To emphasise its Zionist
credentials, the Israeli
Labour Party is standing as
the Zionist Union for the
purpose of the elections. It
wishes to make it clear that
it is not ‘soft’ when it comes
to the Arabs. Unlike the
right, the Zionist ‘left’ has
always hidden behind the
formulation of Israel as a
Jewish and democratic state,
but, as the Jewish Nazi MK,
Rabbi Meir Kahanem put it,
you can have a Jewish state
or a democratic state, but
you cannot have both.
As is normal in Israel,
parties suddenly spring up
for no other reason than
there is an election. This
time we have Kulanu,
a ‘centrist’ party (in
Israeli terms), but hardline on security, and
Yachad, formed by the
former leader of the ultraorthodox Sephardic Shas
party, Eli Yishai, which
is on the Zionist right.
This rapid formation and
disappearance of political
parties, usually based
around a single individual,
is a by-product of Israeli
settler-colonialism and its
distorted class politics.
If the Israeli Labour
Party were even the
equivalent of a European
social democratic party
and Israel was a normal
bourgeois democracy,
it would be romping
home. Whilst the cost
of housing continues to
soar (provoking the tent
protests three years ago),
and poverty and low wages
affect even the Jewish
sector of the population,
billions of shekels are spent
on the settlements. Coupled
with this there are now
revelations that Netanyahu
and his wife, Sara, spent
public money on takeaways,
cleaners and even the
transfer of garden furniture
from the prime ministerial
residence to their own
private home. Netanyahu
is a good example of the
marriage of racism and
corruption, yet Israeli
Labour cannot land a blow.
Another Likud coalition
seems the likeliest outcome.
However, if Likud and
the Zionist right do lose
a number of seats and the
Zionist centre gains a few,
then the second most likely
outcome is a repeat of the
2009 general election, when
Labour went into a coalition
with Likud and virtually
destroyed itself. There is,
after all, no difference of
principle between Likud
and Labour. Isaac Hertzog,
the new Labour leader,
made that clear when Israeli
Labour representatives
on the Central Elections
Committee voted along
with Likud and the Zionist
right to ban Haneen Zoabi
of Balad from standing
in the election (Ms Zoabi
successfully challenged this
in the supreme court).
It probably did not occur
to Labour that it might be
more appropriate to bar
existing racist members of
the Knesset, such as Ayelet
Shaked, who advocated the
murder of all Palestinian
mothers, because they will
only give birth to Palestinian
‘terrorists’ or ‘snakes’, in
her description. Racism
and Israeli Labour have
always gone hand in hand
and that is why, whatever
the mathematical outcome,
Israel’s general elections will
herald no change.
The last time the Israeli
Labour Party won a
convincing majority was
in 1992. Yitzhak Rabin’s
victory was primarily on
account of the freezing
by George Bush of export
credits by the United
States. Despite recent
differences, there is no sign
that Obama is thinking of
similar moves l
What we
fight for
n Without organisation the
working class is nothing; with
the highest form of organisation
it is everything.
n There exists no real Communist
Party today. There are many socalled ‘parties’ on the left. In
reality they are confessional sects.
Members who disagree with the
prescribed ‘line’ are expected to
gag themselves in public. Either
that or face expulsion.
n
Communists operate
according to the principles of
democratic centralism. Through
ongoing debate we seek to achieve
unity in action and a common
world outlook. As long as they
support agreed actions, members
should have the right to speak
openly and form temporary or
permanent factions.
n Communists oppose all
imperialist wars and occupations
but constantly strive to bring
to the fore the fundamental
question - ending war is bound
up with ending capitalism.
n Communists are
internationalists. Everywhere
we strive for the closest unity and
agreement of working class and
progressive parties of all countries.
We oppose every manifestation
of national sectionalism. It is an
internationalist duty to uphold the
principle, ‘One state, one party’.
n The working class must be
organised globally. Without
a global Communist Party,
a Communist International,
the struggle against capital is
weakened and lacks coordination.
n Communists have no interest
apart from the working class
as a whole. They differ only in
recognising the importance of
Marxism as a guide to practice.
That theory is no dogma, but
must be constantly added to
and enriched.
n Capitalism in its ceaseless
search for profit puts the future
of humanity at risk. Capitalism
i s s y n o n y m o u s w i t h w a r,
pollution, exploitation and crisis.
As a global system capitalism
can only be superseded globally.
n The capitalist class will never
willingly allow their wealth and
power to be taken away by a
parliamentary vote.
n We will use the most militant
methods objective circumstances
allow to achieve a federal republic
of England, Scotland and Wales,
a united, federal Ireland and a
United States of Europe.
n Communists favour industrial
unions. Bureaucracy and class
compromise must be fought and
the trade unions transformed
into schools for communism.
n Communists are champions
of the oppressed. Women’s
oppression, combating racism and
chauvinism, and the struggle for
peace and ecological sustainability
are just as much working class
questions as pay, trade union rights
and demands for high-quality
health, housing and education.
n Socialism represents victory
in the battle for democracy. It
is the rule of the working class.
Socialism is either democratic
or, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union,
it turns into its opposite.
n Socialism is the first stage
of the worldwide transition
to communism - a system
which knows neither wars,
exploitation, money, classes,
states nor nations. Communism
is general freedom and the real
beginning of human history.
The Weekly Worker is licensed by November
Publications under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nc/4.0/legalcode.
ISSN 1351-0150.
worker
weekly
No 1048  March 5 2015
Politics, press
and the legal
system serve
money
Corrupt through and through
Politicians are not the only people in power looking to make a quick buck, reckons Paul Demarty
I
n the unlikely event that there
was anyone left in Britain who
believed that the political class is
not riddled with avaricious, grasping
cynics, Jack Straw and Malcolm
Rifkind have offered a timely
reminder. No, ‘Politicians on the
make’ is hardly the most surprising
story of the century, but there are
neat symmetries to the Straw-Rifkind
case that make it an exemplary case
study in the corruption of machine
politics.
Straw and Rifkind, after all, come
from remarkably similar backgrounds
- both scions of the middle class, born
within two months of each other,
both educated at non-elite private
schools and both studying law (and
qualifying for the bar) at good, nonOxbridge universities. It was in their
student days that their paths radically
diverged, with Straw becoming an
‘official communist’ fellow traveller,
and then the first leftwing president
of the National Union of Students in
its post-war history, taking the top
job from Labour-right cold warrior
types.
By the mid-1970s, however,
both had begun their professional
political careers. Rifkind was one of
a small handful of MPs to serve as
cabinet minister throughout Margaret
Thatcher’s entire reign as prime
minister. Straw, meanwhile, slowly
cultivated a reputation as a safe pair
of hands: a near-apolitical ‘fixer’ at
the top of the Labour Party. Finally,
when this scandal swept them up,
both were nearing the end of their
careers in parliament (Straw was not
seeking re-election in his Blackburn
seat; Rifkind was seeking one more
term, although he has now put paid
to that).
They were gulled by a Daily
Telegraph/Channel 4 investigation,
which set up a fake Chinese company,
and approached a shortlist of 12 MPs
- selected not at random, but on the
basis of the commons register of
members’ interests as likely marks.
Of the 12, six replied, but only Straw
and Rifkind were interested enough
to sit in front of a hidden camera.
If this all sounds a little familiar,
it is because it is a little familiar.
Hilariously, the lead journalist on the
project, Antony Barnett, has played
a role in more or less the exact same
sting operation three times now, his
previous two scoops having bookended the New Labour era. In 1998
he caught Derek Draper offering
access to the upper echelons of the
Blair government; and in 2010 he
found a slew of MPs - including
Labour ex-ministers Stephen Byers
and Geoff Hoon - only too keen to
lend an ear to his fake lobbying firm.
An Observer op-ed by Barnett
(March 1) wonders why politicians
are so easy to hook with this kind
of thing. “It’s the money, stupid,”
he suggests: but even the greedy are
able to smell a con most of the time.
We suggest a wider explanation:
the purchase of access is so very
common that a cold-call from a
Chinese company with no apparent
history at all does not ring any alarm
bells, even to careerists as seasoned
Two of a kind
as these two.
‘In it for
themselves’
We are so far left at the level of
the obvious: the notion, recited
in every pub in the land, that
politicians are corrupt and only
in it for themselves. It is hardly a
straightforwardly positive thing that
this view is so widespread: there is
a thin line between cynicism about
politicians and cynicism about politics
tout court, and people drifting towards
the latter condition tend to become
vulnerable to the machinations of
rightwing demagogues far more than
they become open to leftwing ideas.
The rise of the UK Independence
Party is surely testament to that.
The danger lies in the appearance
that this is a matter of MPs being
individually corrupt, or a view
of Westminster as such being an
institution that generates corruption. In
this context, the Daily Mail can appear
to be the voice of popular common
sense, and Nigel Farage an insurgent
outsider. Instead, we must return
politicians to their place in the broader
apparatus of ruling class power.
Of most immediate importance
here is the fact that senior politicians
often find it a very short journey from
retirement from politics to lucrative
jobs in the private sector. The
(relatively) modest sums an MP will
be happy to declare in the register of
interests pales in comparison to the
riches available later on as a ‘private
citizen’; thus the most attractive bribes
are those that come due after scrutiny
is lifted.
It is not so much that Rifkind and
Straw were on the make; in practice,
they were hoping to ‘hit the ground
running’, so far as their lucrative postparliamentary careers were concerned.
Straw, in particular, will have been
looking hungrily at the example of
Tony Blair, who rakes in millions
offering his ‘services’, whatever they
are, to dictators and robber barons.
Influence among the existing crop
of Westminster MPs is one thing
that Straw and Rifkind can market
to mysterious Chinese companies;
but both have a little something
extra in common. They are former
foreign ministers, and thus will
have connections in the diplomatic
service. (Given the eye-watering
sums exchanged in the arms trade, exdefence ministers are a popular type
to have on the payroll as well.) Straw
claims to have made things happen
as regards EU sanctions against other
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countries; at £5,000 a day, his input
would be cheap at twice the price for
the right buyer.
Rifkind, meanwhile, chaired the
Commons intelligence and security
committee until his little mishap. The
irony here is delicious: in this capacity,
among a multitude of interventions in
craven support of the secret state, he
was happy to bang the chauvinist drum
against the Chinese firm, Huawei,
which was contracted to perform
maintenance work on the British
telecommunications network. It should
be overseen by GCHQ, he said. He
seems to have seen nothing untoward
in another ‘Chinese’ company offering
to pay the chair of the ISC £5,000 a day
to offer a sympathetic ear - provided,
of course, said chair was Malcolm
Rifkind.
The direct bribe - or the mundane
conflict of interest - is only one
means whereby the political caste
is disciplined by the capitalist class.
Another is the restriction of political
choices, of which two methods
bear mention here. The first is the
encroachment of the judiciary on
matters of policy: a process by which
the political class outsources its
choices to an ‘independent’ force.
The trouble is that the judiciary is
‘independent’ only from direct tutelage
of the political parties of the state. It
is, however, ‘independently’ corrupt.
The legal system straightforwardly
rewards those with the money to throw
at lawyers. By a divine coincidence,
both Straw and Rifkind are barristers,
whose ruling creed is that they should
be ‘cabs for hire’. Life may have
taken them elsewhere, but at least the
training has come in handy.
The second method is through
the capitalist media. The media’s
job is to express in a form attractive
to the middle class the political
choices of capital. Since there are
always politicians keen to get their
snouts in the trough, there are always
opportunities to embarrass them;
certainly the last major exposé of this
kind - involving Hoon and Byers - was
part of a sustained and brutal campaign
by the press to get a Tory victory at the
last election.
Exactly what the agenda is here
is unclear (given Rifkind’s petulant,
pompous response to the sting, it
has probably hurt the Tories more
than Labour). We note merely the
irony in, of all papers, The Daily
Telegraph catching Straw and
Rifkind - its own propriety has been
questioned thoroughly in recent weeks,
in connection with its reluctance to
run stories embarrassing to valuable
advertisers.
All these corrupt apparatuses live in a
happy symbiosis: the corruption of each
is the condition for the corruption of all.
The wide distribution of corrupt relations
allows a complete inversion of reality to
occur at the level of ideology, whereby
each can be said to be somehow holding
the others to account.
Forgetting our two heroes for a
moment, the example par excellence of
this phenomenon is the phone-hacking
scandal, which resulted ultimately in
the judiciary making recommendations
to the legislature whereby they would
between them ‘clean up’ the press.
Yet the hacking scandal could only
be as explosive as it was because all
the institutions of the ruling class
establishment had spent the previous
three years obstructing the course of
The Guardian’s investigation.
For all these reasons, the left must
move beyond gleefully trumpeting
every passing scandal to afflict some
grasping creature of the Westminster
village. Overcoming corruption
means overcoming the whole ossified
structure that props up the rule of a
declining class - and posing a serious
democratic alternative l
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